Contemporary and historical imagery combine in the orange-soaked acrylic paintings and hand-selected silkscreens in artist Knowledge Bennett's Orange is the New Black exhibition. As a means of representing black history in America, the LA based artist applies a street art methodology to explore the African diaspora and chronologically record the unfair treatment of black Americans by law enforcement and the federal government from the 1930s on.

Images of civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. are displayed alongside portraits of former FBI director J Edgar Hoover and President Nixon. The cover of newspapers and magazine articles trace the ongoing presence of racism within a historical timeline. Headlines like ‘Tortured By Cops’ and ‘Cops Fired 41 Shots’ appear on what the artist calls “prison jumpsuit orange” canvases. The show also tackles more recent political news in paintings like Bennett’s Warholian Mao/Trump piece.

Bennett says his work is like, “a magnifying glass, placed directly over the long term relationship between the American Government and the Black Community. A relationship where corruption, oppression, and systematic disenfranchisement is all too familiar.”

Knowledge Bennett's Orange Is The New Black was on display at the Joseph Gross Gallery through December 3, 2016. Check out more work by Knowledge Bennett on his website.

" target="_blank">beards. The party kicked off with 70 minutes of silence, broken by a short speech from Abramović, followed by British artist and singer ANOHNI's stunning rendition of "My Way," popularized by Frank Sinatra, and later, Sid Vicious. Then management broke out the champagne and the birthday girl gave the cameras the bird for the awesome photo above.

Abramović turned 70 on November 30, but last night was the official celebration, attended by artists Andres Serrano, Martha Tuttle, Nir Hod, Dustin Yellin, Shirin Neshat, as well as actress Naomi Campbell, magician David Copperfield, and Monica Lewinsky.

Perusing the booths of the 269 galleries exhibiting at this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was effectively impossible to do nonstop; fairgoers were bound to need a coffee or Cubano refuel at one of the many cafés in the convention center at some point. Attendees itching for sugar however, were presented with a much more interesting option: the art-meets-candy store booth by Irena Haiduk of Kavi Gupta Gallery, part of the Kabinett section of the fair.

Slightly less straightforward than your local confectionery, Haiduk’s Bon Bon Bon Ton (3 Bon, 1 Ton): Balkan Outlet asked more from its prospective customers than a sugar craving and some money. If interested in purchasing candy, the fairgoer had to fill out a form stating their name, their income level (lower, middle, upper), and measure their stress level in terms of “weight carried upon your shoulders” (low is 11lbs, middle is 33lbs, high is 55lbs or more).

After these curiously personal bits of information were revealed, the final section of the form asked you to select a “candy period” representative of your ideological “taste,” with 4 distinct options available to choose from: Imperialism, Fascism, Communism/Socialism, and Capitalism.

Slightly more than just a weird marketing survey or an arbitrary questionnaire, each answer yielded a different effect on the candy outcome: “The selected income level determined how much visitors paid for the resulting package; the weight and pressure of living determined the weight of the candy and which book was given (selected from three books containing oral pamphlets I wrote, which vary from the levity of humor to writings demanding brain blood sacrifice); and the section of ideological taste determined the kind of candy they received,” Haiduk explains to The Creators Project.

All of these correlations are somewhat odd but also sort of sensible, except for the parallels drawn between the selected ideology and the type of candy received. But the specific type of candy Haiduk distributed (a far cry from your run-of-the-mill Skittles or Haribo) bridged this gap of information: “The candy on offer was produced by a Croatian confectionary, Josip Kraš, formerly Union Candy,” the artist reveals. “Kraš survived all four ideological “options” without gaps in production: the first Yugoslavia (imperialist, established in 1918), WWII when Croatia joined the fascists, the second (communist) Yugoslavia, the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s, and ultimately the privatized transnational capitalism of the EU.”

Transforming the act of consumption into a reflection of one’s political beliefs is a cleverly calculated move in a cultural time of political unrest and shown at an event that is perhaps the epitome of ostentatious capitalism, results that are in line with Haiduk’s goal for her project: “I intended this transaction to be about class awareness, the meanings of weight, and the corruption of mind and teeth via books and candy,” tells the artist. “The main thing I wanted the project to do is serve inequality back in an engaging way.”

Check out more of Irena Haiduk’s works here, and stay tuned for future shows by the artist at Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Dresses are more likely to be worn as attire to draw the eye than as a self-contained sound system to lure the ear. But my ears perked up when midway through the first night of Claire Chase's density 2036: part iv—an evening of flute, vocal, and breath works performed at NYC experimental arts venue The Kitchen—the renowned flutist was outfitted by a chorus member in a plated silver skirt of flattened speakers. I watched as she was then handed a swab of glowing cables that resembled the spilled intestinal tubes of Ash, the android from Alien. Chase put this tangle to her mouth and began to play.

As the stage and platform lighting dimmed to a mere two spotlights, ghostly sounds emerging from the dress filled the room in a foggy ambience. From the corner, a second woman in a speaker dress—its designer, the Peruvian musician and sound artist Pauchi Sasaki—was making her own noises, scream-like breaths amplified from a headset and mic hanging over her lips. In slow, methodical steps, the two performers enacted a Butoh-like choreography; their bodies and attire embodying the aurality of the space.

What I was witnessing was the world premiere of Gama XV: Piece for Two Speaker Dresses, described in the program as exploring “the relationship between air as sound source; body as a medium of sound amplification; and space as the container of [elemental] interaction.” Also making its premiere was the second of Sasaki’s speaker dresses (the one worn by Chase). “For the first dress,” Sasaki wrote in her artist’s note,” a usually soundless skin becomes the sound source for the dress.” Sasaki added that for the second dress, she “wanted to visually integrate air and respiration.” The web of chords played by Claire was meant as a “mask...with several [tubes] connected to a purse [emanating] negative ions, becoming an emulation of an artificial ‘lung system.’"

Following the performance, Sasaki was kind enough to answer a few questions from The Creators Project:

The Creators Project: How did you make the dresses and how did they fit into the performance?

Pauchi Sasaki: I made the first speaker dress in 2014; it is a self-contained system that functions with three stereo amplifiers, a battery, and covered in 100 speakers. The second dress, which premiered today, is made out of 125 speakers. It’s an independent system, everything is wearable. Both dresses utilize a double-wireless system—one travels from the microphone to the headset to the mixer. And the other brings in receives the signals for the sounds I designed through a Max MSP patch. In designing these, I wanted to stress their efficiency as a self-contained system. This was the first time I had two dresses on stage at the same time so it was very exciting to see how they played off each other, and how, as sound sources, they could move around the space.

Can you talk to me about your choreography process in working with these dresses?

This piece is based on structure, not note by note. It’s all done by scenes. The first scene were done by interpretive instruction—take deep breaths, sound like a firework, now a squirrel. But these are component ideas; the next full scene was to make diagonal sounds with our body, like screaming and pulling sound away from the body. Each scene had its own specific treatment.

A few years ago, I was to perform in a temple in Lima, and I brought my violin and my system to process its sounds. But of course, it’s an ancient temple, so there was no electricity or outlets; I could perform only acoustic sounds, even though that’s not what I had planned. That’s when I got the idea of a self-contained system, but one that could be integrated into my body, that was the idea.This resulted in the first speaker dress that wasn’t just functional as a mobile sound system, but also as something visually compelling.

What kind of performances with these dresses do you have in mind for the future?

My dream, well, I say that after suffering through building the second dress [laughs], my dream is to make a medium-sized opera with very weird characters. But medium-sized because these dresses don’t really function well in large concert halls, where it’s hard to manipulate the sound sources.

Will there be male characters?

For now, no. I’m focused on femininity and what it means to have a body that screams. So I’m just sticking with feminine dresses for now. But rather than developing a male counterpart, I’d like to work on more androgynous outfits. I think that’s what I’ll work on next.

Superheroes lose their powers all the time, that’s one of the hallmarks of comic book storytelling. But this week’s top spot goes to The Unworthy Thor, which shows everyone’s favorite Norse god as a down-and-out, hammerless, haphazard hero. The switch is great, completely refreshing, and shows Marvel’s willingness to make a left turn when the money says they should be barrelling straight ahead. Today’s roundup also sees the addition of a new weekly segment, the “Manga of the Week.” This column aims to take advantage of the fact that comic publishers are making it easier than ever to read new manga the same day (or, at least, same week) as it publishes in Japan—a far cry from the old days when readers would have to wait years for the comics to be bulk collected, translated, and published as expensive packages.

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor, portrayed by Chris Hemsworth, enjoys playing Avenger, smashing up his brother, and going on roadtrips with Hulk, the Thor of the comic world is in a sad, sorry state. He doesn’t get to have much fun these days, especially in a series with a title like The Unworthy Thor. Here’s how he landed in such a rut: the intergalactic Watcher whispered a secret in his ear (we don’t know yet what that secret actually was), and poof! He’s suddenly unworthy to wield his hammer, Mjolnir. This series sees him reeling from that loss (no more flying around, no more lightning), and this issue, specifically, sees the god of thunder confront a thief and begin to track down another hammer. While this series could be dour and mopey, writer Jason Aaron has given Thor a “grin and bear it” attitude. He drinks, he punches people, and he’s got a big, nasty axe that will just have to get the job done until he gets his hammer back. And in doing so, Aaron and artist Olivier Coipel (who illustrates Thor rugged, bearded, and sketchily drawn) have created a downtrodden hero that doesn’t leave the reader feeling trod upon.

Nightwing is Dick Grayson, who used to be a secret agent in the DC Universe, and before that nipped at Batman’s heel as Robin. Now he’s all grown up, dressed in sleek, black spandex, and hopping around the rooftops of Bludhaven, a gritty, seaside city south of Gotham. The city itself plays a huge role in this issue, as Nightwing finally returns after a long hiatus, and it reads a bit like Atlantic City c.1977. Writer Tim Seeley first made a splash in the comic world by co-creating Hack/Slash, a comic that revolutionized the horror genre. This new work, ideally, will open plenty of storytelling opportunities for him as Nightwing returns to Bludhaven as a stranger in a strange land. The art by Marcus To also seems to be revelling in Nightwing’s hardbody physique in a way that’s rare and refreshing in comics. Normally we get boxy superheroes who, sure, are muscle-bound, but To draws Nightwing like a young Greek god, and when he’s in his tights he oozes sex appeal, something DC usually tries to limit to their old-fashioned stable of objectified women villains a lá Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.

Deadpool is the kind of hero one has to be in the mood for. On one hand, he and his foul-mouthed, meta, fourth-wall breaking hijinks can feel refreshingly counter to everything mainstream comics purports to be. On the other, sometimes reading a Deadpool comic (or watching the movie) can feel like hanging with a group of kids at a Spencer’s Gifts wearing shirts that read “I can’t hear you, the voices in my head are too loud.” If readers are feeling the former, then his ongoing series can make for a great read. This issue, for instance, sees Deadpool churning through baddies trying to find the cure for a disease, and his relationship with Agent Emily Preston is really charming as they hunt down a villain growing like a fungus out of some poor sap’s stomach.

Attack on Titan, and the massively popular anime it spawned, centers on a civilization besieged by giant “Titans.” These monsters mercilessly eat humans, but as the story develops their purpose, creation, and role in the world is muddier than mere monsters. This latest issue will leave those jumping right in scratching their heads, but it’s a masterclass in plotting dialogue. Hajime Isayama, creator of the series, unloads a lot of information in this issue, but the tension is high, the guilt-stricken characters (only two are really featured throughout the entire chapter) explode in anger, sink into a shellshocked state, and hit emotional highs and lows everywhere in between. If readers are trying to create their own comics and could use a primer on how to properly lay out panels without action, they should watch this video of Marvel creator Chris Samnee explaining his work, and read this issue of Attack on Titan.

The delicate hand with luscious nails clasping gently at a red rose is a rarely-discussed but potent symbol of Americana. Across the suburban and metropolitan plains of the U.S., these typically neon signs are the gatekeepers to a type of small, no-frills nail salons slowly on the decline as high-end salons with quieter, but more contemporary layouts and designs spread across the country. Still, the rose hand remains relatively ubiquitous at our present moment and it serves as the central point of inspiration for wunderkind artist Awol Erizku’s ongoing solo show at Miami gallery Nina Johnson.

I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me exterior view, Awol Erizku, 2016

I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me incorporates this nail salon signage in every single work, nearly all paintings beyond a neon fixture in front of the space. But Erizku’s series isn’t merely a re-contextualization of a commercial signifier placed into an art space; each iteration of the rose has its typically white hand transformed into a different shade of brown, an act that reveals yet another example of “white as default” cultural practice, one that is particularly strange when considering how nail salons are operated by non-white individuals and servicing often non-white clientele.

Pick up the phone – Young Thug & Travis Scott, Awol Erizku, 2016

This bizarre cultural phenomenon alongside the ambiguity of the sign were some of the larger driving forces for the artist: “What drew me to the ubiquitous nail salon sign at first was the fact that I never had seen a version with a black hand, and second, that it’s weird that this motif doesn’t communicate whether the hand is receiving the rose or giving it,” Erizku explains to The Creators Project. “The moment the hand is black, considering the racial tension and political climate of our country, it took on a whole new life and meaning, which was very exciting to me as the basis for a new body of work.”

Codeine Crazy - Future, Awol Erizku, 2016

Although the nail salon sign and its racial undertones are the cultural focal points of I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me, a variety of other cultural signifiers are also embedded into Erizku’s works. Every work is named after a popular hip-hop track describing a facet of, from Young Thug and Travis Scott’s imploration for their partner’s faithfulness "Pick Up the Phone" to "Codeine Crazy," Future’s ode to lean. “They’re songs I’ve dedicated to my partner, Sarah Lineberger. She’s my biggest muse and the inspiration behind most, if not all, of my floral works,” Erizku adds.

I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me installation view, Awol Erizku, 2016

The final element of the exhibition is something he calls a ‘conceptual mixtape,' a fusion of pop songs and the artist’s own personalized sound bites that form a sort of sound collage, a practice that the artist has previously employed in his past five solo shows. For this exhibition, Erizku’s conceptual mixtape incorporates the voices of his friends that “happened to be at the recording studio in LA while I was working on the mixtape.”

I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me installation view, Awol Erizku, 2016

Come and See Me ft. Drake – PARTYNEXTDOOR, Awol Erizku, 2016

I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me is on display at Nina Johnson in Miami through January 7th. View more of Awol Erizku’s works here. A website iteration of the exhibition, filled with images of the works and Erizku’s partner as well as an accompanying video of the artist at work can be seen here.

While there's something haunting about lost and lonesome video game characters, there's something oddly satisfying about watching well-known adversaries, say, Ryu and Ken Masters, or Sub Zero and Scorpion, temporarily overlooking their differences and coddling one another in a warm embrace. We can all thank digital artist and animator Dario Alva, better known as cavecanems, for scratching that itch, thanks to a short series of videos for the Internet Moon Gallery. Alva positions different fictional characters in a white abyss with their bodies tightly interlocked as they tenderly embrace. In these sexy, short vignettes, the camera often zooms in on the mouths of the 3D renderings, resulting in an overtly intimate display of the lover’s affection. These close-ups show the slippery tongues of either character, making the viewer feel almost as though they are intruding on the subjects’ privacy. To make matters even more uncomfortable, Alva collaborated with sound designers 0Fash and Diego Navarro, who put slimy and sloppy sound effects over steamy scores. In addition to the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat couples, Spyro the Dragon can be spotted softly caressing the lower back of Crash Bandicoot. Your inner child is probably kicking and screaming right now. Check out some juicy smooches below:

Calle 22 isn’t just a lively city street in Bogota, it's also the name of conceptual artist Julius von Bismarck’s latest art film project screening at the Alexander Levy Gallery. No stranger to guerrilla art-filmmaking actions, Bismarck shoots the south side of the street at 2,500 frames-per-second from the back seat of a pickup. As the vehicle zips down the street, his special high-speed camera and spotlight combo captures pockets of life seemingly frozen in time like deer in headlights. The footage in Calle 22 makes the suburban street look almost like a painting—as if someone has pressed the pause button on life. But if you look carefully, you see that the characters in the film are still moving, just very slowly. This is what happens when you shoot in super-slow-motion whilst moving at an accelerated rate. In a way, Bismarck is demonstrating the way bees and other fast-flying insects see the world.

Within the course of the film, the camera car moves from the more affluent corners of the street to those less well off, capturing a city’s wealth disparity within the span of a single street. Originally from Germany, Bismarck asserts the issue of the outside gaze on the social strata of another country. His use of a spotlight references Western photography’s intrusive and often invasive quality seen in Western reports of other cultures. The Alexander Levy Gallery writes, “Through the fast drive of the pickup and the conical light of the spotlight, individual scenes are focused and the people of Bogota portrayed as if by accident, because until they have realized the moment of the shot, the camera is already ahead.”

The artist shared a short excerpt from the film on his website. Check out below:

Julius von Bismarck’s Calle 22 will be screening at the Alexander Levy Gallery from December 9 to December 21. For more information about the show, click on the event’s Facebook page. For more work by the artist, head over to his website.

With "Let It Snow," and "Winter Wonderland," blaring over the cheap speakers of every department store and gas station in America, it's easy to buy into the propoganda that winter is awesome. It's not. (Unless you live somewhere with insane natural beauty like Finland.) If you live in a region with seasons, then freezing rain, slush, sleet, and snow soak your boots and track into your home. A chunk of sub-zero moisture always finds a way to fall down the back of your shirt, no matter how bundled up you are. If you live somewhere that's warm all year, you have it even worse—watching holiday movies with snow incepts an insidious FOMO on the spine chills, shivers, and Seasonal Affective Disorder. Luckily, we've gathered a volley of GIFs that encapsulate the constant state of discomfort winter brings. Below, Crispe, Nino Paulito, NeonMob, and more convince you to make like my grandparents and fly south for the winter.

In recent years, the Sundance Film Festival has grown to a showcase a variety of virtual reality projects. One of this year’s entries is Through You, an experimental multimedia dance project that uses the medium to place the viewer into the thick of a lifelong romance. Created by dancers and choreographers Lily Baldwin (who was our guide to the Women of Cinefamily Weekend film festival) and Saschka Unseld, Through You begins—much like Mark Danielewski’s experimental novel Only Revolutions—in the two main characters' teenage years, and follows them in a stream-of-consciousness style through time, space, and memory.

In Through You, viewers experience reality as the lover of a character (and main dancer) named Julia. After an argument in this teenage bedroom, Julia decides to leave the relationship, passing through the viewer and, in doing so, becoming the presence occupied by the viewer throughout the rest of the experience.

Lily Baldwin in Through You test shoot

“The presence we embody in the experience is the memory our main dancer has of a lover in her youth,” Baldwin and Unseld explain. “We, the presence of her memory, stay will her throughout her whole life. We are her unrelenting memory (never-ending connection, enduring witness). We exist through her. We are her capacity to love and feel.”

“We start out by being Julia's lover,” Unseld adds. “And then, after she walks through us and leave us, we become her memory of us, seeing Julia's life continue without us.”

Cast and crew onset Through You. Photo by Cameron Berton

The Through You VR project began nearly a year ago after Baldwin and Unseld were accepted into the Sundance Institute New Frontier | Jaunt VR Residency Program. Though they worked with Sundance every step of the way, the two found themselves with their backs to the wall time-wise, as the final shoot unfolded two days before the final submission deadline.

Baldwin and Unseld tell The Creators Project that this is their first official venture with dance in a virtual space. They have, however, done a number of tests to see how much movement they can get away with as far as moving bodies and the roving VR camera.

With Through You, the duo were interested in how it must feel to be truly present with a dance—to not only be in the thick of the dance, but to be the dancer. This is the experience they want for their viewers.

Joanna Kotze and Amari Cheatom in Through You. Photo by Cameron Berton

“Watching a moving body in VR gives you a greater sense of body,” Baldwin explains. “It reincarnates the real life electricity of a performance—this outmoded art pastime that’s getting lost in the digital world.”

Baldwin, who trained and works as a dancer, started making raw stop-motion short films while touring with David Byrne. After 150 shows, she came to realize that dance involved helping people understand music. She found that dance gave audiences permission to feel something that did not necessarily fit into words. This is when she first felt compelled to turn the “electricity of a live performance” into an object or cinematic vessel that could, as she explains, “transcend borders, language, and endure time.”

To bring this approach to VR, Baldwin and Unseld had to take a number of risks and do a lot of trial and error. According to the two artists, they took a radical approach to camera movement. Unseld’s 15-plus years of work in cinematography and technology undoubtedly helped in this regard.

In VR, the camera is usually stationary so that the viewer barely moves in space. This is because it is assumed that sudden and sustained movement will trigger motion sickness. But Baldwin and Unseld saw this perceived drawback as highlighting the inherent power in moving the camera, so they found a way to, as they say, “constantly be moving, constantly be moved."

“Moving the camera is a problem as we shoot in 360°, so any direction of the camera is visible,” Unseld adds. “That is why shoots that move the camera are super expensive as the camera dolly needs to painstakingly be painted out in post.”

Amari Cheatom and Marni Wood in Through You. Photo by Cameron Berton

Baldwin and Unseld got around this problem by using a perfectly black floor and donning black suits that rendered them invisible when seen against the ground. In this way they could always be present and move the camera around without anyone seeing them in the final shot.

“The other breaking-the-rules aspect in Through You is editing,” Unseld notes. “Traditionally, VR pieces are slow and light on cuts, as cuts are normally confusing to people. But our approach is radical in that we cut in a speed and rhythm that is completely unprecedented. The way we cut feels closest to a stream of consciousness dream.”

Lily Baldwin and Sashka Unseld. Photo by Cameron Berton

Baldwin and Unseld are aware that their experimentation and methods, many of them explored in their video Lawrence (watch below), will likely provoke some controversy. But, ultimately, they want to remove 'accepted VR protocol' from narrative in general.

“We realized that VR is the ultimate medium to not only capture the raw energy of dance but to bring to it something that has never been possible before,” says Baldwin. “To let the audience dance with the performer—to make the audience feel as if they are wildly adept dancer, and to feel their body doing things they never thought possible.”

A young girl embraces the heart-shaped trunk of a tree that has been cut down. She clings to it as if willing it to live, but all is not lost: A green shoot has begun to curl from the stump. In the world of the painting, Nevergiveup, which now adorns a building at bustling intersection in the heart of Santiago, Chile, and in reality, both are as tall as the buildings that surround them.

In a phone interview with Creators Project, Italian muralist Millo, a.k.a., Francesco Camillo Giorgino, says he chose to paint Nevergiveup because the building is so centrally located. “I knew there was a possibility that a lot of people would see it so I wanted it to carry a message,” he explains. That message, he says, is about caring for the natural world and changing our relationship with the environment. He believes the message is universal and can be understood by everyone, even city dwellers.

Nevergiveup, 2016, Courtesy of Millo. Photo: Hecho en Casa

Millo began his career as an architect, but, rather than design new structures, he has become better known for adorning buildings that already exist with paintings that remind us of the people who live in them. Buildings and the forces that build and tear them down can often seem bigger and more important than the individual human lives in a city. Despite their scale, his vignettes of mountain sized children at play in urban environments convey a feeling that the human spirit still matters. They seem to say to the viewer, “you can tower, too.”

Nevergiveup, 2016, Courtesy of Millo. Photo: Fotosaereas

“Even if we are abusing the Earth, with love and with passion and with changing our mindsets, it can get better. Only if we do it with our hearts, can we change the approach,” he says. Planning and using our minds can come later, the artist believes; first we have to feel. The title of the mural is meant to be encouraging. “The situation seems very bad, as if there is nothing we can do, but for me there is always hope. I see the situation in a positive way,” he insists. The child represents the next generation who have the power to make change.

Nevergiveup, 2016, Courtesy of Millo. Photo: Hecho en Casa

There are a few more layers to this one. It could be read as being about hope in a broader sense. Millo's characters are children but they are also all of us and each one has a lot of Millo in them too. Nevergiveup had a personal and real life inspiration that came when its creator was in Norway this past summer visiting a very old park. He found the stump of an ancient tree in the shape of a heart and started dreaming up ways to use the image in a future piece. Not that it's all that important to appreciating the finished mural, though—“This is my story, but art can be interpreted by everyone. Everyone can create his own story around an art piece,” he says. In short, how you choose to read his message is up to you.

Nevergiveup, 2016, Courtesy of Millo. Photo: Fernanda Landin

Nevergiveup, 2016, Courtesy of Millo. Photo: Hecho en Casa

Nevergiveup was created as part of the Hecho en Casa street art festival and can be seen at the intersection of Augustinas and Mac-Iver in Santiago, Chile. Find out more about Hecho en Casa Fest and Millo on their websites.

Although they may look like print screenshots of your old CPU, these works were actually made on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. Line-by-line, German artist Arno Beck builds glitchy arithmetic images, meticulously hammering out patterns from the typewriter’s index of letters and symbols. In an artist statement on his website, Beck writes, “I’m driven by the search for an analog translation of digital imagery. I utilize this printing method as a means of producing paintings in a wider sense.”

Beck’s work shows the transformation of digital imagery to a physical pictorial space through an analog device—in this case, the typewriter. He creates magnified and over-pixelated pictures of archaic CPU systems and application windows, borrowing imagery from old video games and graphic design computer programs. These reflections of old art making software allow the artist to insert “simulated painterly gestures.”

The performative aspect of this work is captured in a process video released by the artist on Vimeo. The short film shows the artist sitting down at a desk with his typewriter as he constructs one of his paintings. In a short description, Beck writes about the box grid embedded into the interface of every typewriter and how it creates a frame or template for his works, sort of like scaffolding on the side of building. See it come to life below:

Touting artworks “fresh from the artist’s studio” per the press release, the Nova section of this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach was easily the most cutting edge section in the fair. This was, in no small part, due to Nova’s requirement for booths to show artworks created within the past three years, but also because of the high caliber of the predominantly young artists on view, which included many of-the-moment names like Korakrit Arunanondchai, Aleksandra Domanović, and Oliver Laric. Out of the 35 refreshing booths at Nova, we’ve narrowed down six you need to know now.

Xavier Antin and Renaud Jerez at Galerie Crèvecoeur

Galerie Crèvecoeur Booth View

At the booth of Parisian Galerie Crèvecoeur, the vivid hues and sublime geological forms of Xavier Antin's Liquidity, data flows, and dirty hands lured fairgoers in like moths to a fire. The abstract wall works seemed highly decorative and somewhat superficial at a first glance, but as a gallerist from Galerie Crèvecoeur explained to me, the process behind the works reveals a much higher degree of complexity at play.

Each piece is the result of a digital scanner recording a technique of design known as paper marbling. This unique fusion of digital and analog technology allows the various moments of ink flow that happen throughout the marbleizing process to be scanned digitally and transposed within a singular image, a smashing of temporal moments into a singular image somewhat like a contemporary iteration of photographer Marey’s iconic motion studies.

Korakrit Arunanondchai and Harold Ancart at C L E A R I N G

Like an antithesis to the alluring and heavily technological works of Antin, artist Renaud Jerez's shambling humanoid sculptures were almost repulsively and decisively ephemeral. Adorned in burned bandages, cloth, and what appear to be small sewage pipes, these “people” creepily border life and death, lounging around like skeletal mementoes of fairgoers from the past. Wearing mildly fashionable clothes often overflowing in fur and never making “eye contact” with the works in the booth, perhaps the artist has intended for these sculptures to serve as metaphors for frivolous fairgoers, often more concerned with selfies and appearances than with the art itself.

Always a master of aesthetic spectacle, the singular work by Korakrit Arunanondchai on view at C L E A R I N G was an entire post-apocalyptic world inside of a medium-sized glass display case. Arunanondchai’s fusion of dead tree roots and bamboo with fiber optics cables and neon lights seemed to represent a post-human earth, one where our technological advances have decayed into the surrounding remnants of a natural environment, transforming Earth’s landscape into a Matrix-esque monstrosity. A detail of note is a sculpture of the artist’s face fused with a drone embedded within the back of the piece, an eerie, fossil-like fusion of life and tech.

Alongside this sculpture are a series of bright, fiery paintings by Harold Ancart, a Belgian artist who works out of the same studio as Arunanondchai in Brooklyn. Perhaps not as apocalyptic as Arunanondchai's sculpture by possessing an overwhelming cheerful, pastel palette, Ancart’s paintings still seem to show moments of destruction, depicting fiery blazes consuming the surrounding landscape within the frame. The burning energy of these paintings provided a calculated counterpoint to the nearby sculptural mass of death and decay, with each artists’ works representing a form of turmoil in a unique way.

Anna K.E. and Florian Meisenberg at Simone Subal Gallery

Simone Subal Gallery Booth View

New York’s Simone Subal Gallery chose artist couple Anna K.E. and Florian Meisenberg to herald their Basel booth. K.E.’s renderings of cyborgian hands floating through space that are seemingly ‘scanned’ by transparent, light-emitting shutters seem to share little in common (beyond palette) with Meisenberg’s geometric paintings, filled to the brim with references to nature and antiquity that often morph into figurative depictions of human bodies.

Simone Subal Gallery Booth View

But the different approaches and concerns of the artists come together beautifully in Late Checkout, the video installation centerpiece of the booth which is a collaborative work by the artist couple. Elevated on top of a slanted memory foam seating area, the video depicts K.E. in a strange bodysuit while being filmed by Meisenberg inside of a luxury hotel. Rebelling against the typically helpless position of the filmed in relation to the recorder, K.E. uses an app to see how she is being filmed in real time, thus being able to adjust her own positioning and bodily movement in accordance to her desired representation, a gesture that feels like a poetic way of to portray a relationship in emotional balance.

Domanović presented two different veins of work for Tanya Leighton’s booth. The first stems from her contemporary exploration of Danse Macabre, a form of medieval memento mori art where skeletons and other personifications of death are embedded into otherwise typical scenes. While making her digital iteration of this genre, the artist discovered that there were no renderings of female skeletons available online to download and incorporate in her works leading her to create her own custom female skeleton, denoted through a print of female-inflected pelvis, on view at the booth. Domanović’s other series on view is another reinterpretation of older cultural production, recreating Greek Votive Offerings, this time for WNBA players instead of the mythical subject matter employed centuries ago.

Tanya Leighton Booth View

Laric’s works on view also possessed a strong classical influence. As an ongoing project, the artist frequently negotiates permission from museums and other cultural institutions to scan, alter, and print pre-existing sculptures within their collection, often altering their physical forms and material outputs. On view at the Tanya Leighton booth were both the physical 3D print-outs of some of these sculptures, as well as a print that depicts a collection of these sculptural renderings, somewhat like a trophy case of re-interpreted sculptures from past eras.

Kasper Müller at Société

Société Booth View

An intelligent reaction to the selfie culture that is pervasive at art fairs, Kaspar Müller's works at Société were seemingly all about the viewer. Various vintage chairs, including a green, sparkling throne by Marco Zanini (one of the founders of the legendary design collective Memphis Group) and a blow-up mattress invited fairgoers to sit and contemplate the very-instagrammable glass balls that filled-up the booth, tethered together by ropes from the ceiling to the ground.

Société Booth View

But beyond their aesthetic appeal, Müller’s glass balls are mysterious relics with hidden power. Each ball possesses a unique and sometimes dangerous trait, including one filled with uranium gas and a less harmful one imbued with gold. The exact qualities of each are not easily apparent and the press release intentionally conceals their qualities, resulting in the feverishly photographing masses to be entirely in the dark as to the complexities of what they are posting on social media.

Vern Blosum and Chadwick Rantanen at ESSEX STREET

Daisy, Gerbera Gavinea, Vern Blosum, 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist and ESSEX STREET, New York

Vern Blosum's straightforward paintings of flowers and Chadwick Rantanen's hanging animatronic turkeys seem like a strange pairing for an art fair section that values curatorial cohesion, but there was a lot more under the surface at ESSEX STREET's Art Basel booth. For one, Blosum doesn’t exist; the name is an alias of an abstract expressionist artist who set out to prove the frivolity of Pop art by creating Pop art works under the name ‘Vern Blosum’ in the 1960s. The fictional (and still anonymous) artist was somewhat successful in his mission to undermine pop art, having one of his ‘fraudulent artworks’ acquired by MoMA, at the time unaware of the fictitious nature of the artist, although this acquisition did nothing to halt the art movement, which continued to pick-up steam throughout the decade.

Essex Street Booth View

The hovering turkeys by Rantanen cling to a similar idea of fake appearances, although less so in terms of art world shallowness than regarding consumer deceit in capitalist cultures. These modified hunting decoys normally run on AA batteries, but the artist has created custom battery adapters with kitschy bee patterns that allow AAA batteries to be used instead. Focusing on how there are few effective differences between the plethora of battery types, besides functioning as additional products to goad users into buying, the duplicity at play is perfectly at synch with Blosum’s intentionally trite Pop, undoubtedly marking Essex Street as another Nova highlight.

In the late 19th century, Southern California attracted misfits, idealists, and entrepreneurs with few ties to anyone or anything. Swamis, spiritualists, and other self-proclaimed religious authorities quickly made their way out West to forge new faiths. Independent book publishers, motivational speakers, and metaphysical-minded artists and writers then became part of the Los Angeles landscape. City of the Seekers examines how the legacy of this spiritual freedom enables artists to make creative work as part of their practices.

Art made on mobile devices is nothing new, but what happens when an established, near-lifelong sculptor takes to her smartphone to illustrate? In Cheryl Beychok's case, the result is a range of vivid, swirly, and psychedelic portraits of languorous women occupying the unseen space between earth and the spirit world.

Cosmic Woman

Beychok has been making art since she was a little girl, when she illustrated her class assignments with watercolors and pencil. (She even went so far as to sell artwork to her classmates for a whopping nickel apiece.) As a teen, she relocated to Israel for three years, where she studied English literature and embraced her burgeoning career as an artist.

Soon, Beychok had a strange dream she was in France, exploring the streets of Montmartre. Six months later, she won a pair of tickets to Paris, which were mailed to her on her birthday. She took all of it as a sign and went with a friend. In the midst of a major bout of déjà vu, Beychok happened to glance over at a studio that literally had her first name on it. The studio belonged to a sculptor, and it was then that she decided to pursue the discipline herself.

With sculptures characterized by unique perspective and scale, Beychok says she's influenced by the work of Rodin, Michelangelo, and Bernini, just to name a few. Not one to be restricted to a single art form, however, she eventually turned to drawing on her iPhone. Her newest creations are at once soothing and unsettling; vivid and dark; simple and thought-provoking. In other words, they’re visual embodiments of the contradictions inherent in each of us.

Inside We Are All Endless Oceans

"I don’t know what prompted it," she says of her decision to take up smartphone art. "I had heard David Hockney was making art on an iPad, and I thought I’d see what it was all about. I certainly didn’t know I’d burst out into colors; I tended to stay away from painting and color—I liked the simplicity of shape and volume. I thought color would just explode my brain and I’d be paralyzed trying to make choices. So it just evolved organically."

When it comes to her process, Beychok resists being confined by timelines and deadlines. She lets her work develop gradually, without the restriction of a finishing date. "I consider myself a vessel through which the creative process travels," she explains. "I have learned not to analyze the gift or try to figure out the mechanics of how it flows through me. I just try to get out of the way and allow it. And, lately, I have felt 'I’m going to need a bigger boat.'"

As Boundless As The Sea

Beychok has been living in Southern California since the age of three, after her father "got tired of the cramped quarters of Brooklyn." She was raised with tales of Jewish people emerging from slavery and wandering the desert, as well as the notion of tikkun olam ("repair of the world"). As Beychok decribes, "It is the idea that we bear responsibility not only for our own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large."

Just like a lot of other people, Beychok found herself believing that LA was a cultural desert for a long time. But she eventually came around to seeing that it's a place full of inspiration and wonder. "The wide open spaces, diversity, and all manner of spiritual offerings contribute to a non-oppressive environment and foster my creative freedom of expression," she says. "Extricating oneself from enslavement (in whatever form it takes) and coming out the other side to exuberance, excitement and enlightenment would probably be my notion of spirituality."

Pirates, treasure, spaceships, robots, and an undercurrent of transhumanist critique—Moscow-based animator Vitaliy Shushko's whip-fast animated sci-fi adventure short X-Story has it all. Created over the course of two years by Shushko and a small team of animators, the comic artist's 13-minute short film debut has the look of an early 2000s Disney movie (think Atlantis or Treasure Planet), but with a heaping helping of grotesquery and acerbic Russian wit.

X-Story follows a ruthless treasure hunter with a bionic arm as he hunts for ancient technology in a futuristic universe that draws fiercely from the megacities of Blade Runner and Akira. It opens with a gritty neon palette, including a flashy advertisement for a robotic prosthetics. "Cast away that rotting piece of flesh you call an 'arm,'" reads a billboard shilling for the Power Arm 5X. That's exactly what our protagonist seems to have done. His left arm shines metalically as he acquires a treasure map and journies to a remote tower in the desert to seek his fortune.

The action sequences that follow will thrill anyone who grew up playing platformers like Metroid or Prince of Persia. The treasure hunter navigates obstacles, climbs walls, and in the boss fight he must quickly analyze a giant robot's strenghths and weaknesses in order to defeat it. "This should be a videogame [sic], same art style and all," one commenter glows.

Exquisitely detailed animation style supports a story layered with irony and dark comedy, from lowbrow jokes about bodily functions to multiple reversals in what the audience knows about both our hero and the treasure he seeks. It also sets up a concise, if heavy-handed, commentary on the dangers of adopting technology at the expense of humanity. Shushko accomplishes all this without a single line of dialogue, limiting his voice acting to the ocassional grunt and one blood-curdling shriek. X-Story is visual storytelling at its finest.

The independent animator has been posting his progress on a blog since he announced the film in January 2015, but early concepts appear in his work as early as 2011. That work has clearly paid off, since the film has been shared far and wide since he released it last month, including the POW! WOW! Worldwide Instagram where we found it. His previous work includes motion comics with a cyberpunk aesthetic and numerous tributes to greats like Batman and Hellboy, whose influence on X-Story is clear.

Today, Pantone Color Institute®, the global authority on color, named their Color of the Year 2017: 15-0343 Greenery. Described as "a fresh and zesty yellow-green shade that evokes the first days of spring, when nature's greens revive, restore and renew," the vibrant green with yellow undertones provides rejuvenation and a reconnection to both nature and something larger than oneself. According to the Pantone institute's vice president Laurie Pressman “We are so submerged in our routines and tethered to devices, but we have a great desire to disconnect and replenish."

Since 1999, the Pantone Color Institute® has been scouting trends in fashion, technology, and media, spending the whole year to investigate influences that best explain the zeitgeist. The very first color of the year was Cerulean blue as an alleviation of the angst associated with Y2K. Last year’s pink and blue hues were associated with gender equity. This year, Pantone describes the optimistic new bright green shade as “refreshing and revitalizing,” as well as “symbolic of new beginnings." With this choice, Pantone’s team contributes to the cultural conversation caused by political turmoil and social tumult, and puts the red-blue color palette to rest.

Check out Pantone's recommended color pairings below.

Click here to learn more about Pantone's Color of the Year 2016. Download your Greenery color palette here.

]]>http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/217772Masha (Maria) Koblyakova for The Creators ProjectDesignPantonecolor of the yearGreenfreshrejuvenateLaurie PressmanPantone Color Institute®http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/puppets-near-death-experience-premiere
Thu, 08 Dec 2016 16:25:00 +0000Tom thinks back on all his friends in the latest episode of The Creatures of Yes. Screencap via

What starts as a polite dinner party among friends soon devolves into existential crisis and a comedy of manners in the latest episode of The Creatures of Yes. The series, created by brothers Jacob and Caleb Graham, follows a group of puppets as they go about their life and times, and distinguishes itself with its throwback recording equipment and careful production design. This week’s episode, “Near Death Experience,” showcases what the series is best at: subverting expectations and complicating plotlines while remaining family friendly. There’s even a sense of gentleness to these videos that is rare for the modern wave of “must-shock” puppetry aimed at viewers above seven.

The creation of this episode comes from a fairly plain point of origin. “Honestly, we've just been wanting to make a video for a long time where the puppets are sitting around a table,” creator Jacob Graham explains to The Creators Project. “I must take this opportunity to thank my mother-in-law for the miniature china and silverware.” With every video, the tiny team incrementally advances their production and technique. This time around, Graham describes their newest innovations as simply being “the first time we had all our lights hooked up to a dimmer box. So we were able have much greater control lighting the scenes than before. In the past the lights were all just on full blast and I'd tape wax paper and things like that over them to diffuse them a little.” Jacob Graham’s other line of work also brings him into the light, as the touring liquid-light and “hologram” artist for the band Sound of Ceres.

Mary Broomfellow invites you to her table in the latest episode of The Creatures of Yes. Screencap via

Watching this episode, it’s clear that careful attention to detail guides the production, even though it’s a fairly minimal set. “When we were making it we kept saying ‘this is the most challenging one yet!’” says Graham. “But now I can't remember why that was. The whole thing is a blur. I rarely remember the process—maybe the finished videos push all the work out of my mind. I do remember when we were making this video that the ‘food’ was just heavy whipping cream with black and green food coloring and it kept going bad and smelling awful.”

As the small blue puppet Tom considers whether or not he’s choking, and the characters begin to mumble about baseball teams, a tide of unspoken tension rises. “It's hard to boil down the way [co-creator and brother] Caleb and I write,” says Jacob Graham of their collaborative process. “We'll have some very vague ideas, then write a little script, then talk about it for a few days and say ‘hey, what if this happened too?’. Then when we start shooting we'll have more ideas that we'll try to include.” With such a small team, he says that they even have the luxury of going back for reshoots and added scenes or moments while in the editing bay.

Watch the latest episode of The Creatures of Yes below, premiering exclusively on The Creators Project:

Dazzling light projections, hashtag-happy pop-ups, and catchy, participatory installations often steal the show at massive art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach, but this year it’s several quiet yet compelling photo series that really captivate. Take a moment away from the champagne-sponsored carts and big name gallery booths and you’ll find thoughtful meditations on what it means to be a woman in 2016. In sobering black-and-white photos and colorful, digitally edited shots, these photographers explore female identity and expressions of sexuality to find new, liberatory modes of representation.

Zanele Muholi

The South African photographer Zanele Muholi makes black-and-white photos of stoic women in tightly cropped frames. One image at the Stevenson gallery booth shows a nude woman holding up a photo of two rhinos. This meta-picture highlights her upper body strength and fierce eyes; she seems pointedly disinterested in including her hair, breasts, and hands in the shot. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a male photographer cropping out the same features in a photo of a female subject.) Muholi has described her mission as “to re-write a black, queer, and trans visual history of South Africa” that evidences their strength and resistance.

Zanele Muholi, Sebenzile, Parktown, 2016

Zanele Muholi, Dudu, Parktown, 2016

Collier Schorr

Collier Schorr’s hazy, screenshot-style photo of a woman skyping someone from her computer is installed at the 303 Gallery booth. Wearing a black lace negligee and sporting a septum ring, the subject’s skin glows with an electric, yellow-blue light. The haphazard angle it’s shot from and imperfect cropping (her eyes are out of the frame) are bold gestural moves that put forward a new idea of portrait photography that is more raw, experimental, and revelatory.

Deana Lawson

Deana Lawson, Living Room, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 2015

Deana Lawson’s luminous photographs of black women and couples are on view next to abstract sculptures and a LED light installation at Rhona Hoffman Gallery’s booth. In her work, Lawson explores familial relationships, female sexuality, and what she refers to as “black aesthetics.” In one portrait a woman wearing a satin, sapphire-blue dress gazes directly at the camera with her hands posed upwards as if in prayer. The cut-out fabric at her middle draws attention to a pregnant belly—taking what would otherwise be a straightforward portrait of a woman in a domestic space to a new level of beauty and bizarrity.

Talia Chetrit

The dispatch of Talia Chetrit photos on view at the Kaufman Repetto booth from a recent show in Milan take on voyeurism and rail against objectification. In one photo, a camera cord coils up suggestively to meet a plush set of pubic hair; in another, a black, heart shape-ribbed dress conceals half of the subject’s chest while revealing one breast. In an especially provocative shot, she is naked and bending over to photograph her reflection in a mirror—turning her body into a distinctly sculptural form. By turning the lens on herself, Chetrit at once makes herself vulnerable and emboldens her identity, inviting the viewer to do the same.

Shot high above the sunburnt ground, aerial images capture the order and the immensity of the biggest refugee camp in the world: Dadaab, Kenya. Photographer Brendan Bannon’s series of images from high above is featured in part of an ongoing group exhibition at the MoMA, whose title, Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, just happens to describe equally well the narrative arch of the past ten years of Bannon’s career.

Bannon has also spent the last decade obsessively documenting the plight of refugees. It is an issue he feels a personal draw to. As a girl, his mother fled with her family from their home in Ukraine to escape Stalin’s violent purges. “I grew up on stories of [my mother and her family] traveling across Europe in a horse drawn wagon,” Bannon tells The Creators Project. “Something about those stories, the genesis of my family, made me interested in what refugees go through and what happens after they escape the wars they flee.”

October 2011. Brendan Bannon/IOM/UNHCR

In 2006, this interest led Bannon straight to the heart of the matter, otherwise known as Dadaab. It was his first trip to Africa and he had been hired by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to photograph a flood that had engulfed the desert camp. “It was supposed to be a day job,” Bannon says, “flying up and back from Nairobi, but the situation worsened and I decided to stay and keep photographing.” Houses, business, schools, and roads were destroyed under 3 to 4 feet of water and he was often wading through water that was chest deep, he describes. “I spent the next week walking through the camp with residents visiting homes, hearing stories, and making pictures.”

In 2011, Bannon returned to the camp under entirely opposite circumstances. A drought and a massive influx of refugees prompted groups like UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) to redouble their efforts in Dadaab. Bannon worked with all three of these organizations, striving to “tell the story of the people arriving by the thousands.”

October, 2011. Brendan Bannon/IOM/UNHCR

The photographer ended up cramped together with a videographer inside a Cessna, its passenger door removed, soaring above Dadaab’s arid plain. “The camp is vast and it is so hard to get a sense of scale,” says Bannon. “Even in the pictures I made you can barely tell how big it is.” At the time of photographing, there were five main settlements in the camps housing around 500,000 people. And while Bannon’s photographs can only capture one or two of the sections of the camp, they nonetheless give viewers a unique vantage point.

“You get a sense of the scale of the place: it is massive, a series of interconnected towns settled by refugees and inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people for the last 25 years.”

“I loved seeing the paths that were made by people and livestock when I flew over,” Bannon continues. “Seeing the way the land was inhabited and organized and utilized was incredible. You see examples [of this] when you’re walking around but you don’t get the sense of time. The wear marks in the sand that only happened over generations of use tell another layer of the story.”

He recognizes, however, that the aerial images can only tell so much of the story of the thousands of lives below him. “Something aerial shows is the organization and longevity of the place,” he says. “Being on the ground among people gives you a chance to understand individual stories and there are hundreds of thousands of individual stories in a place like Dadaab.” His complementary series on Dadaab, shot during the same period, does just this: it contrasts the detached spectacle of the camp from above with up-close and personal images of the lives of refugees, mostly Somali refugees, on the ground.

October, 2011. Brendan Bannon/IOM/UNHCR

Even these images, however, give but a fleeting glimpse. “The biggest challenge in telling stories of people in crisis is that you are meeting people at the worst moment of their lives,” Bannon says. “You have very little time to delve into the stories of who they were before the crisis and almost no time to understand the depth of the experiences they are living through. If you manage to do a good job, the chances that you’ll have avenue to tell the stories with the depth they warrant is slim. So it can feel like a betrayal to ask someone’s trust and then only be able to tell a small part of what they share with you.”

“The inability to change the situation for people is also frustrating and upsetting,” he adds. “I often remind myself that the most important thing in the moment of reporting is to listen, really listen to what you are being told. If you can't be present you shouldn't be there.”

October, 2011. Brendan Bannon/IOM/UNHCR

Despite their limitations, for many of us, images like Bannon’s and those of his fellow artists in the MoMA exhibition are some of the few resources we have to attempt to come to a better understanding of the lives of refugees. And Bannon recognizes this. “Any exhibition, picture, poem, film, interview, article that treats the refugee situation as a complex multidimensional and human situation is important,” he says. “We live in a moment when serious thought and even compassion are trivialized. Exhibits like the one at the MoMA seek to elevate the conversation and create a basis of knowledge and thought so we can understand and react intelligently and with awareness.”

And what does the photographer think are the consequences of trivializing the refugee situation? “In the current moment there seems to be little understanding of refugees in the United States,” he observes. “It is precisely because of the overwhelming ignorance of refugee realities that refugees have been so readily made pawns, scapegoats, and boogeymen in our current election and politics. Refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers are all lumped together in one pot by politicians and press. When there is an absence of basic understanding it is incredibly easy to manipulate people's’ emotions.”

October, 2011. Brendan Bannon/IOM/UNHCR

“When people hear individual stories they are often moved to empathy,” he adds. “Before this year’s election I usually saw and empathetic response to the tragedies of refugee life. Now there is much more veniality and anxiety. It’s a pity that there is so much fear directed at people who have already lost so much. These refugees are the victims not the perpetrators.”

Sometime whilst creating filmed backdrops of sheep for the Brokeback Mountain opera, video artist Tal Yarden realized he had much a bigger pastoral project that he could turn into a series of peaceful video lullabies. The artist recently turned this footage of the retired Wyoming ranchers into Counting Sheep, the current Midnight Moment on Time Square’s electronic billboards, giving “the city that never sleeps” some sheep to count so that they might find some dreamy peace.

Yarden, who has worked with Cindy Sherman and shot video for the David Bowie Lazarus musical, tells The Creators Project that Counting Sheep is the merging of two projects. The first, of course, was the documentary with his collaborator, Jessica Medenbach, in which he followed brothers Peto and Don Meike over the course of their last year of ranching. The other project was a series of “peaceful lullaby” projections on billboards in the city that never sleeps so that they would be “benevolent reminders to sleep and dream.”

“The two ideas came together for me with the desire to create a meditative series of visuals that reconnect an urban audience to nature and the seasons,” says Yarden. He and Medenbach filmed the Meike brothers in the Big Horn mountains of Wyoming near Kaycee. Originally he was drawn to the area because of its connection to Annie Proulx’s story, Brokeback Mountain.

“Peto Meike brought us up to the summer pastures to film and offered his dogs as assistant directors,” Yarden says. “I would ask for the sheep to move over the landscape in certain directions and the dogs would make it happen.”

The artist has returned to Kaycee and the Meike ranch in various seasons to continue filming the sheep. To shoot the video, Yarden used a Canon 1DC for 4K footage, and a Sony FX700 for slow-motion scenes.

“Yarden is a seminal artist changing environments via moving image and whilst most of those are indoor environments of theater and opera and musical events, he creates works for seamless, non-framed or non-proscenium screen stages,” says Times Square arts director Sherry Dobbin.

“Through conversations about his current projects and personal creative exploration, we were taken by these pastoral landscapes over the year of seasons. Sheep are a symbol of sleeping, dreaming, passing over into a new threshold and seemed perfect for the month leading to our New Year.”

Yarden wants the sheep passing through the canyons of Wyoming to mirror the mass of humanity passing through Times Square. Ideally, he hopes that the images stop people dead in their tracks for a few moment’s worth of self-reflection.”

“[It's] not so much to count sheep as to rediscover themselves as individuals with a sense of place in the universe,” says Yarden. “The video is a meditation, an opening to peace within ourselves. Maybe it sounds hokey but I want people to find peace. Peace to sleep well, peace to be awake with hope and peace to be with each other.”

Counting Sheep appears on Times Square Arts’s electronic billboards from 11:57 PM until midnight on Duffy Square at Broadway and 46th Street. A soundtrack to Counting Sheep, composed by Yarden and his brother Guy, will be available on Soundcloud.

Attend a virtual reality meetup or conference and the discussion will eventually turn to developing better 3D spatial sound for VR experiences. The New York Times’ VR journalism platform, NYTVR, recently upped the ante (for iOS, Android and Google’s VR platform Daydream) when Tribeca-based Q Department Studio, creators of a VR and augmented reality spatial sound system called Mach1, teamed up with Secret Location—makers of the VR content management system, VUSR—to help bring virtual sound up to speed with visuals.

As Q Department Studio’s Jacqueline Bošnjak tells The Creators Project, she and Mach1 creator Dražen Bošnjak wanted to enter the VR sound arena so that the VR and AR experiences could become more holistically immersive. She says that while sound—as with everyday reality—is half the “presence” for more complete immersion, it lags behind VR’s visuals.

Photo: Dean Zulich

Dražen, an inventor originally from Bosnia known for the immersive quality he brings to his musical compositions and sound design, wanted to bring cinematic quality sound to VR, and developed Mach1 to, ideally, do just that. He developed Mach1 while working on Ridley Scott and Robert Stromberg’s MartianVR experience, as well as the 13-minute Mr. Robot VR experience for Sam Esmail, and other VR projects.

“[H]igh production value is critical in VR and that is only possible if the playback formats support that quality,” says Jacqueline. “Mach1 is the first audio format created specifically for virtual reality and augmented reality… [bringing] cinematic quality sound to VR.”

As Dražen notes, the ability to sense acoustic vibration is one of humanity’s five basic senses—one that helped us survive predators, hunt for food, and locate loved ones. Some aspects of high quality sound require a trained ear to appreciate, while other sounds work through a basic smartphone speaker that is compressed over a wireless signal. He's amazed at the diversity of audio sensations in human hearing, and wants VR and AR audio to reflect this dynamic spectrum.

“Some aspects of visual technologies, mostly at the level of post production and processing are ahead of sound,” says Dražen. “It is much easier to trick the brain that it is hearing the right sound than it seeing the right image therefore exponentially larger amounts of money and time are designated towards developing and processing believable visual effects than sound.”

Poster for The Martian VR experience.

“Up until now there was more incentive to invest in the visual side, but that is rapidly changing with virtual reality,” he adds. “We are now creating a world where the sound is an equal counterpart to the visual.”

Dražen points out that at the level of recording (or, filming) and reproduction, sound is not at all behind visual technologies. But VR demands that spatial audio recording and reproduction techniques move ahead of visuals. Or at least that is what Dražen is hearing from VR and AR designers.

“There is a growing need for high quality sound,” he says. “Directors of VR/AR are now professing that sound is playing a more important role than ever and that it makes up for as much as 60% of the overall experience.”

Poster for the Mr. Robot VR experience, Here Be Dragons.

With Mach1, Dražen says that VR designers get a variable depth within the 3D sound field. He says it’s different than the variable depths inside a 3D sound field based on a game engine’s spatialized sound. A self-professed huge gamer, Dražen thinks gaming’s spatialized sound can be “jarring,” “dead,” and “unimaginative.”

For Dražen, getting VR and AR sound up to speed requires bringing all knowledge from film sound production and post-production, music recording and production, and game sound production to the table, then adapting it to suite virtual or augmented reality needs. Above all, he believes that VR and AR media require strong control of sounds for the purposes of virtual storytelling.

Poster for NYTVR’s Take Flight VR experience.

“We took an approach practiced in music and film production and evolved this into a 3D sound environment,” Dražen explains. “We designed for the transparent sounding system and workflow tools—no artificial coloration, signal processing, or degradation. The mix achieved during the final mix—the creative mix—is the technical mix and would play back exactly the same during VR/AR playback.”

“Nurturing our eye and ear sensors with the qualities worthy of hearing our human voices sing, a subtle breeze in a tree, a water spring, an owl, strums of an acoustic guitar and the distortion of an valve amp,” adds Dražen, “we have the capabilities to do this, and now VR and AR demand quality to reinforce the suspension of disbelief.”

The VR and AR gauntlet has been thrown down. With no potential shortage around the globe of tech innovation in the realm of sound, it should be interesting how any VR sound wars play out.

30 years ago, no one would have thought to put the words digital, media, and arts together in one description. Now, the combination of these seemingly disparate terms defines an entire course of study dealing with computer-based design and storytelling. At the inaugural Femmebit event, some of the most influential pioneers in the field of digital media arts gathered at Human Resources inside a former kung fu theater in LA's Chinatown to discuss the history and future of the still-forming discipline, see new digital shorts, and experience groundbreaking VR projects.

Given the title of the event, it should come as no surprise that nearly all Femmebit panelists, organizers, and more than 40 featured artists are women. A livestreamed VR demo of Casey Kauffmann’s robust yet user-friendly iPhone-based photo-editing app kicked off the immersive, three-day event. The initial experience was a reminder that livestreamed VR is currently reminiscent of online video content 20 years ago: glitchy, awkward, and at the mercy of internet connection speeds.

Apart from the films, Femmebit’s pièce de résistance was an academic panel on digital media arts, moderated by artist and Telefantasy Studios founder JJ Stratford and featuring Rebecca Allen, the founding chair of UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts and the founding director of Nokia Research Lab, along with Candace Reckinger, Professor of the Practice of Cinematic Arts and director of the Jaunt Cinematic VR Lab at USC. The digital media arts pioneers were joined by Holly Willis, chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division at USC, and Shelley Holcomb of Curate.LA. They discussed early experiences creating digital art in labs, and the struggle to reconcile the field’s nascent potential as art form and commercial tool. They speculated about the prospects for an incumbent paradigm shift in the field of digital media arts with the development of VR before a screening of another collection of shorts called “Heterotopias.”

Femmebit concluded with a mimosa brunch and a panel on artists as brand strategists with Samantha Culp of Paloma Powers, and Jenna Isken and Alison Greenberg of Siegel + Gale. The discussion was followed by screening Artists as Cooperatives.

Femmebit is the brainchild of Kate Parsons, associate faculty at Irvine Valley College's School of the Arts and a VR content creator herself. After moving to Los Angeles to attend graduate school three years ago, Parsons says she noticed that the field of digital media arts was dominated by women. So, she joined forces with Sharsten Plenge of We Open Art Houses (WOAH), and writer and founder of Gil’s Sanctuary, Janna Avner, to realize Femmebit. Together, the women aimed to make a forum for women to exchange experiences and share insights about where the field of digital media arts is headed.

One provocative theme Parsons hoped to foster conversations about is the relationship between art and commerce. “So many of the artists we were showing have ties with corporations in a way that enriches their practice,” she emphasizes. Parsons also notes the transformative effects of technology on the VR experience. She says, “All three pieces we showed in our VR installation were originally created to be watched on a screen. Each respective work adapted to virtual reality in a very unusual way.”

Adding to her colleague's insights, Plenge says, "Femmebit aimed to be a celebratory point of connection. We didn't foresee the political climate as it is today following the election. With that happening, I have to say this felt like such an important reason to unite and highlight female artists: I really believe the future is female—in art, in politics, and in and outside any marketplace. I think it's time we all look around more wide-eyed and ask questions and create platforms that are actively doing something to support inclusion without framing exclusive conversations."

As the founder of Strike Gently Co, I deal in pins and patches daily. The Creators Project asked me to pull together a weekly roundup of the best newly-released pins. Most of these will probably sell out. If you like them, smash that “add to cart” button. Every Wednesday, you can head to the bottom of this article for an exclusive discount code so you can keep your pin game sharp.

When you control the means of production and sell aesthetcized lifestyle commodities to the masses, the holiday season is overwhelmingly busy. In other words, the pin game is on fire this week. All of these brands released doozies, and there are a dozen more good pins for every one included in here. Check 'em all out and show some love. And head to my shop, STRIKE GENTLY CO, for 20% off this week with a special discount code at the end of this post.

High Five Pins

Sometimes you think back to the 90s and being a weird kid without many friends and say to yourself, “Wow, I was the only weird kid who liked Tech Decks.” Not true, compadre. If anyone judges you for wearing this one, tell 'em to “catch these digits.”

PSA Press

PSA Press is one of my favorite pin brands. Their products always make me laugh but also say, “But it’s not stupid, also.” This is hilarious and smart. Only eCommerce dweebs and normcore nerds will understand. This also could have been some lame ripoff like ABIBOS, but it’s not. It’s hilarious and smart. Can I say it again until you believe me?

Full Time Hangout

Just in time for the holiday season is the only un-cringeworthy holiday pin I’ve seen so far. It’s simple but great. In the days before LEDs, people hung real-life fire hazards on their holiday trees. If one went out, they all went out. RIP.

Real Sic

I’m a sucker for black-and-gold stuff because weak eyes are fondest of shiny objects, and by God these eyes are about to GO. I’m always squinting—someone trade me a Lasik discount for a write-up, yeah? Speaking of getting old, this pin is about eternal recurrence. So hip and cool, you can wear it on your black trenchcoat while you casually read Thus Spake Zarathustra on the subway (we see you, we know what you're so casually reading).

Beau and Bauble

Regardless of what witchcult neopagan religious tradition you follow, you have got to appreciate the hit 1983 TV rerun classic, A CHRISTMAS STORY. This pin will remind everyone how good the movie is in case they don’t have the opportunity to turn on a TV and see it playing 24/7 on every channel for the rest of the damn month.

With all the cuteness of the Pixar lamp and the hops of a basketball player, a new robot designed by researchers at UC Berkeley is learning the fine art of freerunning. A team led by Ph. D canditate Duncan Haldane has been studying jumping bush babies in order to design the 10.2"-tall SALTO (short for "saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles"). It can leap more than three times its own height from a standstill, then bounce off of a wall like a parkour athlete to fly even higher.

While SALTO isn't the highest-jumping robot in the world, its double-jump ability sets it apart from designs like TAUB, the locust-inspired bot that can jump 10' in the air—but is very slow and can't stick a landing to save its CPU. In a video put out by UC Berkeley, Haldene explains how SALTO could be adapted for rescue missions in rugged terrain, but more importantly you can see SALTO in action, complete with accompanying parkour troupe. It seems that we'll soon be able to add freerunners to the list of creatve jobs robots are overtaking, along with art critics, newscasters, and artists themselves.

Walk into Park Avenue Armory this month and you'll be greeted by a cacophony of Cates. In one corner of the Drill Hall, Cate Blanchett embodies a scientist contemplating Suprematism and Constructivism as she walks the halls of a factory ripped from a Roald Dahl novel. In another, she plays a rotund factory worker musing about architecture. She is a punk, screaming about Stridentism and Creationism, and a choreographer wrangling a troupe of alien Rockettes while espousing the ideas of Fluxus, Merz, and performance.

This assemblage of personas—an acting tour de force 13 characters deep—is Manifesto, Julian Rosefeldt’s film installation that opens today at the Armory in New York. This is the piece’s North American debut; as we previously reported, the piece was at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney this summer. 13 massive screens fill the soaring Wade Thompson Drill Hall, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the imagined lives of 13 different humans and the ideas of more than 50 artistic manifestos and movements.

Installation of Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto at Park Avenue Armory. All installation photos by James Ewing

Try to breeze through Manifesto, and you’ll miss a lot. The mastery of Blanchett’s acting is apparent almost immediately; the genius of Rosefeldt’s filmmaking is more subtle. He’s not afraid to make us wait. In all of the films, Rosefeldt sets the scene by examining the environments his characters inhabit. In Scientist, the seconds tick by as futuristic elevators perform a zippy pas de trois. Tattooed punk is bookended by extended studies of the grimy studio where the scene takes place, including crushed chips in the carpet, a couple making out, and a few dudes in the corner doing coke. Really experiencing the installation means stationing yourself in front of a screen and simply absorbing until you feel stirred to move on.

An unexpected element of Manifesto is the way it sounds. Every so often, Blanchett’s cries for aesthetic revolution ring out through the cavernous space, but in front of the 13 screens, the sound is highly targeted. Stepping directly in front of one of the films unleashes an ocean of noise from overhead; it’s like stepping into a sonic bubble that dissolves when you move on to the next scene.

The piece provokes timeless questions about the weight of words and artists’ role in society. The writing of manifestos first sprang from political movements, and 20th century artists—largely men—widely appropriated the form, starting with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” in 1909. Manifesto surveys movements ranging from Surrealism and Minimalism to Dadaism and Pop art, quoting masters like Tristan Tzara, Kazimir Malevich, André Breton, and Sol LeWitt. Blanchett’s embodiment of their words—moulding and adapting them to each scenario—demonstrates the mutability of language and invites viewers to consider the gendered, social, and political contexts that shape disruption.

Its fluctuant nature is a nice fit for the ever-experimental Armory. “Manifesto is a singular work of creative vision, which furthers the Armory’s tradition of mounting multidisciplinary projects that defy categorization,” Pierre Audi, Artistic Director of Park Avenue Armory, says. “We are pleased to bring this soaring tribute to the artist manifesto, the result of an ambitious collaboration between two world-class artists, to our majestic drill hall in a site-specific installation.”

Manifesto is on view at Park Avenue Armory December 7, 2016 through January 8, 2017. For more information and tickets, click here.

A week after we wrote about a monolithic, glitched-out moving sculpture of Franza Kafka’s head in Prague, Czech sculptor and artful provocateur David Cerny returned with another giant public sculpture, Trifoot, which features eyes that track the movements of viewers and pedestrians. The sculpture, on permanent display outside the Czech Press Photo gallery in Prague, resembles a vintage motion picture camera sat atop a tripod, and outfitted with several large moving eyes. In this era of ubiquitous smartphone and CCTV cameras, Cerny’s Trifoot reminds us all that we are living inside a massive, electronic panopticon.

“Trifoot was from the first moment related to photography,” Cerny tells The Creators Project. “It is my old passion. While living in New York I was even doing part-time photography, and cameras were my hobby. I always documented my work by myself and so I always had high-end equipment.”

“So that easily lead me to using the form of a camera as base,” he adds. “And then I was thinking about how we are surrounded by cameras, and then you have the eyes following you when you pass by. And when you look at how it, it has a bit of a face from the front.”

While the gaze of smartphone, CCTV, and other cameras certainly influenced Trifoot, Cerny was also inspired by a classic piece of science fiction—John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. In this post-apocalyptic novel, tall, mobile, and invasive plants called triffids wreak havoc on the world's population with a poison that causes blindness in humans.

To build Trifoot, Cerny used stainless steel for the tripod and camera base, working with sheets by bending, welding, and laminating. For the eyes, Cerny used various composite materials, and set them in motion with a great deal of electronics components and motors. Two tracking camera send signals to the each eye’s motors through onboard computers.

“The motors with gearboxes are synced with tracking cameras,” Cerny explains. “Everything's Siemens Simotions [Motion Control System]-driven—that’s a brand I work with mostly.”

The final sculpture is pretty close to his early conceptual designs, says Cerny. Some details were changed in the process, but he insists that people would have a hard time telling the difference between his renders and photographs of the actual finished sculpture.

Cerny would not say exactly how Day of the Triffids influenced Trifoot, but it seems as if he is suggesting that even with all of our cameras, and the sharing and collecting of still images and videos on social media, we may not be seeing as clearly as we like to think we are.

Cerny is currently working on a mid-sized installation that will be placed in a public space this spring, but is remaining tight-lipped about it. And when not flying and screwing, as he puts it, Cerny is negotiating several other public sculpture requests from around the world, and tending to his multimedia art space MeetFactory, where he cultivates other artists’ and their work.

“[So], I don't feel too productive, but I’m trying to fulfill what I promise in terms of commissions,” says Cerny. “I can imagine doing maybe twice more with no trouble if I have have more interesting projects.”

Trifoot is on permanent display outside the Czech Press Photo gallery in Prague. Click here to see more of David Cerny’s work.

Although the 2016 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach (unfortunately) did not have a section highlighting non-Western art in a similar vein to the Armory’s lauded African Perspectives sector this year, the Miami mega-fair brought together a scattered, but truly superb selection of art not made by artists hailing from Western Europe or the Americas. Here’s our take on the best of the non-West at Art Basel Miami Beach 2016:

Aaajiao at Leo Xu Projects

Gfwlist, Aaajiao

Xu Wenkai, the Shanghai-based artist known by the alias Aaajiao, had work on display at the Leo Xu Projects booth. An artist enthralled by the boundless realms of the Internet and the structures that govern and control it, his works at the fair were nearly-infinite durational pieces dealing with precisely with these themes.

Gfwlist (2010-2013) is a tall and slender black sculpture intentionally reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s big black block from 2001: A Space Odyssey. While the structure in the movie relates to the advancing and evolution of the human species, Aaajiao’s monolith possesses a small, embedded receipt printer which endlessly prints out what appears to be strings of gibberish. The nonsensical characters are in fact encrypted translations of websites with restricted access to Chinese citizens, blocked by the government’s notorious censorship. In a similar vein to how the viewer is incapable of having a concrete understanding of which site each encrypted section refers to, most Chinese citizens only have vague ideas of what these blocked websites are like.

Email Trek, Aaajiao

Aaajiao also showed Email Trek (2016), a newer piece involving an algorithm the artist developed that continuously generates an infinite number of email addresses while sending an altered version of the "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Star Trek speech to each address. On view is an iPad displaying the new email addresses generated in real time, next to which is an enormous static panel displaying thousands of email addresses which were contacted beforehand. The emails in bold represent the addresses which successfully received the message, while the light and nearly transparent ones represent invalid or inactive emails which bounced back the initial emails.

Ibrahim El-Salahi at Vigo

Untitled, Ibrahim El-Salahi

Although Vigo is a London-based gallery founded by British gallerist Toby Clarke, their booth at Art Basel Miami Beach was centered entirely around Ibrahim El-Salahi, an 86-year-old Sudanese painter with arguably the most interesting backstory of any artist in the fair (beyond having fantastic works, of course).

Illustration no. 4 for Tayeb Salih’s novel Maryoud, Ibrahim El-Salahi

Beyond serving as the Director General of Culture of Sudan between 1972 and 1973, working as a surrealist actor in the early days of Sudanese film, and having been invited by the mayor of Qatar to translate the country’s history from Arabic to English (and being the ‘most important African artist of the 21st century’ as Clarke tells me), El-Salahi was at one point, seemingly schizophrenic. According to the gallerist, the artist would sporadically see three tall and peaceful, ghoul-like figures in his surroundings, frequently portraying these odd beings in his early works.

After being beaten and thrown into prison for ‘attempting to overthrow the government’ (but ultimately having no formal charge pinned against him), the artist suddenly stopped seeing visions of these figures and the direction of his work shifted. Prohibited from making art while incarcerated, El Salahi managed to use a 4-inch pencil hidden from the guards and improvised materials around him to continue to make work, albeit in a stylistically different vein than before. After his release, El-Salahi continued to work in his ‘prison style’ between 1976 and 1977, the never-before-seen results of which were on view at the Vigo booth during Art Basel.

Liu Shiyuan at Leo Xu Projects

Love Poem, Liu Shiyuan

Returning to the Leo Xu Projects booth, a gallery which clearly brought the heat to Art Basel, Love Poem by Liu Shiyuan brings the essence of Bill Murray’s Lost in Translation into the art world, through an exploration of the complications inherent to intercultural communication. Taking love poems from different cultures and ceaselessly translating them over and over again into different language until most meaning is lost in the cracks, the artist displayed the resulting unpoetic-poetic lines on five iPads, which display scrolling lines of the newly formed semi-gibberish in 12 different languages. The forced translations, along with the overwhelming amount of text scrolling in alternate directions on the screen was capable of overwhelming even the biggest polyglots at the art fair.

Taro Izumi at Take Ninagawa

Installation view, Taro Izumi

Taro Izumi's two video installations at Take Ninagawa were in the running for the most technically complex works at the fair. In both Fish Bone as Slang (In Search of a Cat), and The Allure of the Whale that Winks with its Fin, Izumi enacts a similar process: First, the artist films himself doing a parkour-like acrobatic route around an urban Japanese setting, climbing and jumping on anything in his vicinity.

Installation view, Taro Izumi

Screening this footage on small monitors, the artist places a series of household items, from bottles and glasses to hammers and rulers, directly in front of the monitors in such a way that they imitate the forms of the urban structures on the screen.

The combinations of screens and objects are then filmed in real time and projected immediately onto the walls, becoming live reinterpretations of the prior footage taken by the artist. In these new iterations, Izumi runs up the edge of a ruler to the top of a building and jumps from the cap of a Gatorade bottle to the top of a glass vase, all done in an inhumanly perfect synchrony indicative of an unfathomable amount of pre-planning.

Wong Ping at Edouard Malingue Gallery

Although I visited the Edouard Malingue Gallery booth three times throughout the day, never once was the it occupied by less than 10 visitors. Jungle of Desire, Wong Ping's sole installation was beyond poignant, from the dozens of Lucky Cats ceaselessly waving their paws hypnotically on top of a pink fur carpet to the animated masterpiece in the middle of the space.

The vividly animated video comes from the point of view of an impotent husband who is incapable of sexually pleasing his wife for obvious reasons. Rather than ending the relationship, his wife behaves in line with her philosophy that “Love and sex are separate things," but soon turns to prostitution once her legion of sex toys prove to be insufficient tools for adequate satisfaction.

Jungle of Desire installation view, Wong Ping

Surprisingly, the husband doesn’t seem to mind the awkward nature of the situation until a police officer who is capable of “completely satisfying his wife” like no other begins to make repeated visits for free under the threat that he will otherwise arrest her for her illegal activities.

The impotent narrator begins to fantasize of his deep desire to become invisible but also sexually potent, not out of a yearning to satisfy his wife but to be able to harass and viciously rape the antagonistic police officer perpetually and without him knowing what is happening to him. The narrator delves into great detail as to how this will drive the police officer into profound madness until committing suicide through the igniting of his own desperate farts. A raw and raunchy exploration of sexual frustration and the drive for power and dominion, Ping’s video is as visually biting as it is conceptually brilliant, encouraging repeated viewings.

Born out of the nihilism of the atomic bomb, butoh is a Japanese form of dance that eludes simple definition. It explores notions of the primordial self in a modern world, protests changing paradigms, and looks deep into the darker and more uncomfortable aspects of humanity. Common tropes in the physical technique of the dance include stark white makeup, excruciatingly slow movements, and unnatural and taboo body positions (the silent scream, for example, perhaps inspiring the ghosts in The Grudge).

For butoh dancer and video director Caroline Haydon, it forms the basis for Siksya, a glitchy, unnerving, and mesmerizingly slow dance film set to the music of Clem Right. In it, various female figures (all performed by Haydon herself) shudder, sigh, and dance, while all the shades that black and white can be undulate around and frame the hypnosis.

Haydon describes the inspiration for the piece as a “strong image in [her] mind of a woman ‘made of clay,’ so to speak, living in a stark and sterile environment. She catches sight of herself which sparks the realization that she is ‘disappearing,’ and losing her ability to ‘feel.’ She is then faced with the choice of either re-discovering her sensory experience and facing her reality, or remaining in her illusions and fading into the cold environment she exists within.”

The project was created in collaboration with artists Hirad Sab and Dalena Tran doing the VFX compositing and overlays. For Haydon, it was “an opportunity to explore the concepts of isolation vs. community, and a desensitization to suffering. I am always fascinated by the human mind and our ability to 'tune out' anything we don’t necessarily want to face, on both a personal and a global scale—our power to exist within a vacuum simply by ignoring the suffering surrounding us, and the effect that voluntary ignorance has on our compassion and our sense of reality.”

"What has always compelled me about butoh is what I call the ‘ancient familiarity,’" she continues, "a recognition of the performer’s journey that is deeply understood but that cannot be put into words. I am intrigued by how butoh converses with other mediums of art, and how the traditions of the form speak to our contemporary world.”

Watch Siksya above, and see more of Caroline Haydon’s work on her website.

Move over Dilbert, this film is about to make your existence petty. Handpainted with watercolors, an emotive seven-minute animated short titled El Empleo (“The Employment”) bizarrely captures contemporary notions of productivity through the life of one man on his way to work. Directed by Santiago "Bou" Grasso a Santiago, Argentina, film director, the video relies on a simple illustrated aesthetic to weave a complicated story of society and one’s role within it.

The story follows an "ordinary" man on his daily routine to work. Yet, there is an unexpected twist that brings a new dimension to the narrative weight and captivates the viewer. A table and chairs are completely made up of humans folded over each other while a street stoplight is made up of two individuals hanging from a post and flashing their red or green tshirts from under their coats. Each scene is mesmerizing and further complicates our ideas of productivity and service. Is it a message about how we use and abuse each other? Or a cautionary tale about how much we rely on technology and how we may be fated to live without it?

El Empleo is a heavy exploration into these ideas and more. Since its debut in 2008, the short film has won prizes worldwide because of its ability to probe the larger societal models we take for granted. Yet the film is eloquent in spinning us on our heads with a simple technique. To make the film more universal and far reaching, the director decided to keep it short and without words but magnifies the plausible future with the characters actions and captivating everyday sounds.

Grasso operates the independent animation house, opusBOU, that makes short films mixing 2D techniques and stop-motion. One of his latest short films, PADRE, talks about the political situation in Argentina in the 80s and has just won the Festival Internazionale di Corti d'Animazione in Italy.

If you want to warp your mind and start on an existential journey see El Empleo for yourself below:

A new permanent mathematics gallery designed by Zaha Hadid Architects has opened at London's Science Museum. It features over 100 treasured objects from the museum's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics collections. Not only is it the first UK project from Zaha Hadid Architects to open since Dame Zaha Hadid’s untimely death, it's also the first permanent public exhibition space designed by the architect.

The space is not only home to mathematical curiosities like a 17th century Islamic astrolabe—a way to map the night sky—and an early example of the Enigma machine, but mathematics has also defined its design. Zaha Hadid Architects took inspiration from the historic 1929 Handley Page aircraft—which is at the centre of the gallery—for the space and incorporated airflow equations used in aviation into the aerodynamically-influenced structure.

Lit up in purple the curved layout and lines are a representation of the flow fields that circulated around the Handley Page aircraft when it was in flight. This idea runs through everything in the space, to the way the showcases are positioned to the benches people can sit on, and the arched surfaces of the pod structure at the center.

"Using the principles of a mathematical approach known as computational fluid dynamics, which acts as an organizational guide, the layout of the Gallery allows for the virtual lines of air flow to be manifested physically," says Zaha Hadid Architects. "The harmonious positioning of the more than 100 historical objects, and the successful production of robust arch-like benches using robotic manufacture, all embody the mathematical spirit of the brief. The resulting spatial experience created by these components within the Winton Gallery enables visitors to see some of the many actual and perceivable ways in which mathematics touches our lives."

The late Dame Hadid studied mathematics at university which sparked an interest in geometry and in turn architecture. Mathematics went on to inform her design work and architecture practices.

"When I was growing up in Iraq, math was an everyday part of life," Hadid says in a 2015 interview with CNN. "My parents instilled in me a passion for discovery, and they never made a distinction between science and creativity. We would play with math problems just as we would play with pens and paper to draw—math was like sketching."

Mathematics: The Winton Gallery designed by Zaha Hadid Architects opens daily at the Science Museum, London from 8 December 2016. To learn more about the Science Museum visit their website here. To learn more about Zaha Hadid Architects visit their website here.

Space, the final frontier, is about to get its first native artwork. Israeli artist Eyal Gever (previously, previously) tests the boundaries between physical and digital objects, and now he's gearing up take a giant leap for artist-kind in the International Space Station.

Gever recently teamed up with The Creators Project to launch #Laugh, a crowdsourced audio sculpture using NASA's new zero gravity 3D printer. By downloading an accompanying app, users can record their own laughter and post it to a social media network where others can vote on the file they want sent to space. "The wisdom of the crowd will choose which laughter they want to send to space to represent humanity," Gever says in our documentary Zero-Gravity Space Art | The Process. His custom software will then turn the audio into a 3D sculpture that NASA and zero g-oriented 3D printing company Made in Space will print on board the ISS.

"Eyal Gever does this amazing art that is in some ways already inspired by zero gravity," says Jason Dunn, co-founder and CTO of Made in Space, in another segment of the documentary. He combines familar shapes, such as the human form, with the visual language of computer graphics. Think a dancer made from overflowing water, or a vase suspended in thin air. "It's hard to believe it can even exist," Dunn adds. We caught up with Gever to learn more about #Laugh and the future of art in space.

The Creators Project: Did you pitch this project to NASA and Made in Space, or did they choose you?

Eyal Gever: They chose me.

What is the hardest part about designing for NASA's zero gravity 3D printer?

Like an Earth-bound 3D printer, the device on the ISS uses an additive manufacturing method to print objects in layers of plastics, metals, and other materials. However, space presents some unique challenges to 3D printing—NASA has extremely high standards for health and safety conditions for any hardware or material certified for delivery and use in space as well as for the 3D printed models.

We had to make sure that the sculpture don't have sharp edges, as well as able to be printed in a limited time frame due to limited energy/electricity consumption. These are some of the things relating to the health requirements, and we've accounted for them.

The survival of art as a language of expression! Throughout history technology has provided artists with new tools. As new technologies become available, artists learned to use them and traditional means of expression were transformed or entirely new means of expression were developed. Art is timeless and doesn't fade away with the latest tools/trends. It has been proven through history that art will change, and new styles of artistic expression only enhance the art language as a whole. The camera did not eliminate realistic painting, and technology will not eliminate the traditions of fine art (i.e., paintings, sculptures, etc.).

The same phenomenon of transcendence occurs in art, which may properly be regarded as another form of human technology. When wood, varnishes, and strings are assembled in just the right way, the result is wondrous: a violin, a piano. When such a device is manipulated in just the right way, there is magic of another sort: music. Music goes beyond mere sound. It evokes a response—cognitive, emotional, perhaps spiritual—in the listener, another form of transcendence. All of the arts share the same goal: of communicating from artist to audience. The communication is not of unadorned data, but of the more important items in the phenomenological garden: feelings, ideas, experiences, longings. The Greek meaning of tekhne logia includes art as a key manifestation of technology.

Its about the meaning of the art works that will make it great—the technology to make it is just the enabler.

Why is the milestone of the first artwork in space important for artists?

As we know throughout history, art's unique value is its creative and visionary expression. The new, the original, and the didactic are needed to make a great piece of art. The concepts or ideas involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. True creativity endures as one of the last eternal scarcities!

My understanding of the primary function of art implied when audiences are looking at an artwork, is to convey a meaning, an idea, message through seeing. The old definitions of art became obsolete. Today, art is an evolving and global concept, open to new interpretation!

Whats so great is when looking at art history we've seen that there were no limits to a creative mind implementing new technologies and tools (Oil colors, Photography, etc). As technology/computer software and hardware continue to progress, there will always be those who will experiment and create new art, pushing the envelope of what has been seen before. The boundaries are limitless.

Exactly as the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist said when he was asked about future trends in art: “I don’t think we can predict nor prescribe the future of art. It is the famous Etonnez Moi of Diaghilev and Cocteau, great art always surprises us, takes us where we expect it least.”

Yes. We want to make art in the deepest most remote place on Earth! we know more about space then we know about the inside of mother earth. These conditions will lead me to think about pressure and the continuous physical force exerted on or against an object by something in contact with it for example.

#Laugh will be 3D printed aboard the ISS in March. Download the app and submit your giggles here, and follow Eyal Gever's work on his website.

For reasons that have nothing to do with its content, Design Miami/ is my favorite fair: it’s small, easy to navigate, and makes you want to touch everything (and, when it’s a chair, you can). But as a platform for design, the global forum unwittingly becomes a showcase for visionary thought—utilizing design to imagine the future. Things may seem bleak but at Design Miami/, we found solace and hope in the ideas and dreams of those destined to shape and save the world: women.

Here are just ten we adored, in a sea of designers both emergent and long-established.

Nathalie Du Pasquier at Plusdesign

A founding member of the Memphis group, Nathalie Du Pasquier’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures are bright and geometric and so much fun to look at (and she’s self-taught!). This speaker, at Plusdesign Gallery’s street scene Curio booth, reminded us of Dutch mid-century design and something the Jetsons might keep in their house.

Deon Rubi at Giovanni Beltran

Deon Rubi makes large-scale and small-scale work, and both her jewelry and furniture is simultaneously minimalistic and ostentatious (it takes a steady hand to do what what she does with fine metals and huge hunks of glass). At Under the Endless Sky, a group exhibition, Deon Rubi’s aluminum bench vaguely resembles stacks of hardware you might find at a construction site. The aluminum tubes support each other without any welding, snuggled into place. Designed by Office GA, the booth’s LED screen—one of the most weirdly beautiful sights in the whole fair—cast renderings of the rolling sea and falling snow onto the furniture, and the sheen of her bench was the perfect canvas.

Mimi Jung at Chamber

How can something so delicate become so majestic? The dramatic swoop, the blue-pink gradient of the weaving—Mimi Jung’s wall looks like the movement of the sun as it dips below the horizon in the evening. There is so much history rooted in the art of weaving. Jung makes the complex repetition of the act result in pieces that border on the ethereal.

Beate Kuhn at Jason Jacques Inc.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1927, Beate Kuhn was an avid potter and ceramicist who worked until her passing in 2015. The daughter of a sculptor and a pianist, and a child of World War II, Kuhn’s mostly-abstract aesthetic seems inspired by the flow of nature: rivers, tides, growth. They’re bright, colorful, and sensuous, and make you want to run your hands along all of them.

Katie Stout at R & Company

Katie Stout dazzled Nina Johnson Gallery (formerly Gallery Diet) with her show, Docile/Domicile/Dandy: bubblegum-pink Sculptamold vanities, shiny plush chairs, a sock-covered armoire. Everything looked as if it could become animated, brought to life, and her ceramic pieces have that same kinesthetic quality. She calls her style “naïve pop,” and while it’s lighthearted, it’s far too smart to be considered wholly playful.

Faye Toogood at Friedman Benda

Faye Toogood’s work is not just about the product itself, but the space it occupies—there’s a curatorial element to her work. This piece is called Roly-Poly Chair / Moon, and it's reminiscent of earth creatures and the cosmos. It is, in equal measure, theatrical, dramatic, and cozy.

Justine Mahoney at Southern Guild

Justine Mahoney grew up in South Africa during apartheid, and her interest in the fantastical power of the imagination is charged with the reality of that racial and sociopolitical tension. Note the reference to traditional African art and the slightly disturbing creepiness of this mostly charming, toy-like sculpture.

You might recognize Brittney Palmer from a Playboy cover, or as a scantily clad UFC "Octagon Girl," i.e., one who struts her stuff holding a number to announce what round it is in a professional fight, or whatever. But Palmer's much more than the sum of her million-ish Instagram followers: painting is her passion. But Palmer will be the first to say she didn't always consider herself very good at it.

Her paintings focus on pop-culture icons from Billie Holiday and beyond, though the figures Palmer especially loves were most popular in the 1960s and 70s. There's a woozy, psychedelic style to her portraits, evoking lava lamps and the ubiquitous artwork of Peter Max. Some of her (usually-dead) subjects are recognizable as John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Prince, and so on. Others are less so, though the faces are often presented in the style of strip-mall glamour-portraits or publicity headshots; there's no "candid" feel to any of them. Instead, they are carefully composed and artfully staged renderings of how Palmer views the intersecting worlds of art, music, and entertainment.

Palmer didn’t initially plan on being a visual artist, but turned to painting after a serious car accident meant she couldn't walk on her own for three months. Her burgeoning career as a budding dancer was cut short. “That’s when I picked up the paintbrush and became obsessed,” Palmer tells The Creators Project. In a rare display of self-deprecation among artists, she says painting “was definitely not an instant gift, that's for sure.” Nonetheless, she became as passionate about the art as she was once about dancing.

After developing her skills as a visual artist, Palmer became "hooked" and moved from Las Vegas to LA. Like many other creatives in the City of Angels, she responded to its thriving arts scene. She says, “Art held strong here, [I] just thought it made sense.” Dell Computers CEO Michael Dell is one of her collectors; that, coupled with the waitlist for her commissions, is at least some indication that Palmer made the right move.

The artist is not afraid to draw connections between her work as a painter and as an Octagon Girl. “I couldn’t have one without the other,” she admits. “UFC has given me a platform to show my work to the world”—and of course, she notes, it puts the "art" that is MMA on display.

When asked to describe her own visual style, Palmer calls it “spontaneous realism.” She emphasizes her love of hyperreal faces, vivid hues, and a mixed-media approach to art-making in which no material is excluded, from acrylics and charcoal, to crayon, and even whiskey. "I make sure to bring as much depth to my work as possible,” she says, adding that she embraces multiple influences: “I couldn’t even explain the importance of every person, song writer, model, actor, friend, and family member is to me.”

Palmer draws from personal experience when selecting subjects for her paintings. Whether it's Lana Del Rey or Charles Bukowski, "They all have what it takes to create a great piece.”

For Palmer, creativity means experimentation. It's about following your passion, no matter how little faith you have in yourself, at least initially. It's overcoming fear of failure, trying repeatedly, and ultimately working to move past the limits you've set for yourself. “[T]o create good art is to not be afraid to mess up, to know when to stop and to 100% believe in yourself.”

Ultimately, Palmer believes that her work will help her grow and redefine her own creative approach. And her response to that prospect is enthusiastic: “I can’t wait.”

If you stayed at the EDITION Hotel during Miami Art Week, you likely came back from an all-nighter at Soho House to discover an unexpected photographic memento sprawled on your bed. No one (at least maliciously) broke into your hotel room; these found photographs are courtesy of artist Ruvan Wijesooriya, commissioned by the hotel to leave images from his latest series in guest rooms and in public parts of the hotel.

Surrender to the sun, Ruvan Wijesooriya, 2016

Each of the 17 images to be encountered were inspired by Miami, sometimes in the form of direct, familiar associations like palm trees, bodies of water, and flowers glistening in the sun, but in other moments the images are arguably representative of a sublime, less direct ‘essence’ of the city, particularly exemplified by a series of Sun dial images, objects that aren’t necessarily common in Miami, but whose elegant geometry and heavy balance of shadow and light present a poetic lens into a subjective interpretation of The Magic City.

Sun dial 2, Ruvan Wijesooriya, 2016

But despite how strong or indirect the photographic links to Miami may seem, the artist did in fact shoot all of the images in the city (and hotel) they are encountered in: “All of the images were taken on November 15, 2016 at the EDITION. The plants, the idea of the sundial, and getting lost in the details are all local to the EDITION,” Wijesooriya tells The Creators Project. “Miami for most people is a place for escape. These images speak to that sense of wanting to drift off.”

Pink flower, Ruvan Wijesooriya, 2016

Even if Miami functions as an idyllic escape for many, the tangibility and purposeful lack of ephemerality of the artist’s printed images provide an enduring quality to an otherwise momentary experience, an idea somewhat reflective of his practice at large:

Here forever, Ruvan Wijesooriya, 2016

“The inspiration for this project was to find the timelessness in the ordinary, and capture moments that allow people to get lost and dream a little,” Wijesooriya reveals. “I love surprising people with art and pictures—gifting 4x6 prints has been how most people first experience my work. I think enough people appreciate the surprise and sentiment, so it’s a pleasure to collaborate with EDITION on this project.”

Swimming pool, Ruvan Wijesooriya, 2016

Although Art Week Miami's over and there are no more surprising photographs to be encountered, digital images of Ruvan Wijesooriya’s delicately sensual photographs can be found here.

Since her artwork is so closely connected to public space and human interaction, conceptual artist Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos doesn't operate within the purview of a traditional studio practice. Her inspiration derives from observations of daily life and how technology has become intertwined into our everyday actions. Her subject nudges her into the public sphere.

Kosmatopoulos says she finds her ideas during long walks around the city and days spent sitting in a park. Her eclectic portfolio of sculpture, text works, neon lights installations, and video explore the nature of being present in the modern age, and how our perception of intimacy has changed during recent years. Kosmatopoulos is featured in The Creators Project’s Perspectives series on artists on display at the PULSE Contemporary Art Fair in Miami. Her exhibition at PULSE, The _ _ _ _ _ is absent, poses the idea that we now occupy a space in limbo, split between our virtual and physical selves. The Creators Project spoke with Kosmatopoulos to better understand the mechanics of her process.

The Creators Project: What are some of the steps you take to workshop your ideas into a fully realized body of work?

Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos: It’s very, very strange. I think I’m not creating my work, it's more that I am remembering concepts that have presented themselves to me. You have an instant idea or image and you are just seeing a vague shadow of it. I develop the whole idea in my head and then I render it so I can show it to other people. But when it starts it hits me in a very strange way. I cross the street, and I’m going to hear a sound that, out of the blue, is going to remind me of a poem I learned in high school that I didn't even know I remembered, or maybe it recalls a song I heard six years ago. When it hits me there’s this image that comes to my head, I don't really know where I’m going with it but i know I'm going somewhere. I keep on processing this image and I try to figure out how I can reconstruct it until I land on something more concrete. It’s almost like a sketch in my head: I’m going to move things, and walk and feel out the work and then in the end I have a clear image of how I want the piece to look, and then I 3D render it and share it with people to figure out how to make it.

Genesis 11:1-9 - 2016

I had a residency at the MASS MOCA in North Adams. When I was there I was using Google Translate a lot. I would plug in a new sentence and translate it through Google several times, which allows the algorithm to create a completely new meaning from the original sentence. I knew I liked that. I know I wanted to create more work that involved translation. Three weeks before that, I heard a reporter on NPR interviewing someone who was talking about Genesis. And they were talking about the different meaning of Genesis. I go to the CVS in North Adams and I see index cards and it just hit me. I figured out that I was going to use the book of Genesis — the first sentence that introduces or revisits the Tower of Babel, and translate it several times in Google translate. I decided to make a video where I have my two hands with the index cards, and on each card I'm going to have one of the translations. I cannot explain how it all came together. I just happened to go to CVS to buy an envelope when I saw these index cards and it kind of just hit me.

I have a very visual language. So the image becomes extremely clear in my head but I have to run it through a 3D rendering program to be able to communicate it to others. Because I know very well that my words are not able to allow someone to visualize my idea fully. This is why I’m a visual artist and not a writer. My work is centered around a concept and concepts can be expressed with words but because I’m multi-lingual and I don’t really fully own one language.

Fifteen Pairs of Mouths - 2016

You work through a range of mediums. Once you have conceived an idea how do you go about choosing the medium to best execute it?

One thing that is very important in my work is that I do not create, I re-appropriate. When I was casting the hands, I wanted to get at the code of the museum, of the Greek old statues. So it had to be white, and it had to look like it was from the era of the old Greek marble statues. Like when I was telling you about the video with the index cards, I wanted to use all of the codes that are associated with childhood, so the pen had to be a blue ink. I try to use a code that everybody knows and then twist the meaning of it to challenge the associations with a particular object.

fahrenheit140 - 2014

How do you know when you’re done? Do you give yourself deadlines?

Each work has its own process. But like a week, maximum. Because the work has to be simple. I presume myself like a five-year-old that just questions the object, questions the simple, questions what we take for granted. I want to question the main concept or the main ideas we have. So to do that, the main ideas are simple. I want to remove as much as I can, not add. The final result is very simple. Getting a hand cast in plaster takes 30 minutes to mold the hand, 10 minutes to pull the plaster, and then like one day to finish it and put it on a pedestal. But to get there it takes a month of brainstorming and trying to figure out where I'm going with a certain concept.

Is there a particular place that you like to create all this work?

No. Everyday looks different. Everyday is absolutely different. And I’m very nomadic. The routine and the repetition, first of all, is what kills my work. Because I always love being out of my comfort zone. I think that is very important. This is why when you put me in a beautiful studio with all white walls, my installation might be as sterile as the four walls. I need to be out. I need to be exposed and I need to challenge comfort.

See our Perspectives video on Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos here:

See more of Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos’s art on her website and learn more about the PULSE Contemporary Art Fair here.

Having been at more historic events and met more famous people at their most vulnerable than most, Scottish photographer Harry Benson has had a long and ongoing career. The new documentary Harry Benson: Shoot First immortalizes a man, now 86 years old, who has spent his life immortalizing others in photographs. Today you can watch a clip from the film, exclusively on The Creators Project.

The film starts in 1964, the legendary year Benson spent with The Beatles on their first trip to the United States. “I didn’t want to do that job,” Benson says. “I was going to Africa. I was a serious journalist.” When his editor insisted, the 25-year-old Benson gave in. “I asked why was it me. He said because the other photographer was ugly, and the one thing you couldn’t be around The Beatles was ugly.” He adds, “I knew that photographer, and he was ugly.”

Benson’s images of The Beatles are, without exaggeration, unlike any others. They are instantly recognizable: the pillow fight in the hotel, Paul with a face full of shaving cream, Muhammad Ali “punching” the band’s collective lights out. “There are endless images of The Beatles,” says art consultant Henry Neville in the film, “but there are no images of The Beatles that gain the intimacy that Harry’s photos have done; that understanding of four young kids changing history.”

But the film is quick to prove that Benson is so much more than his Beatles days. He has gotten beneath the skin of some of the most impenetrable icons of the 20th century: Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, Johnny Carson, Sophia Loren, Dolly Parton, the list goes on. Then, he’s been invited back for dinner.

First-hand, Benson has witnessed moments that mattered: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, and the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. He infiltrated KKK rallies in South Carolina, interviewed and photographed Lennon’s murderer, traveled to refugee camps in Somalia, and gone behind the IRA’s closed doors. He took portraits of every US president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was the photographer at Truman Capote’s famed Black and White Ball.

By capturing the bigger picture of Benson’s career, the film takes a look at the life behind the photographer’s legendary lens. It presents an honest portrait of a man who skips family Christmases to get the story, who breaks rules to make new ones, and who competes with everybody, especially himself. A man, in short, who puts his craft above all else; because, as Benson says, “a great photograph can never happen again.”

Harry Benson: Shoot First will be released in theaters, OnDemand, Amazon Video, and on iTunes on December 9th. Find more information about the film on it’s official site and click here to find more of Harry Benson’s work.

Jeremyville is both a man and an idea—a state of mind actualizing Australian optimism fused with New York City hustle. He’s also a Brooklyn-based artist known for creating sunny, snarky illustrated worlds that both affirm and critique the human psyche. For Art Week Miami, Jeremyville infiltrated The Standard Spa, Miami Beach, populating it with characters old and new, including a spritely Miami mascot named Raymundo Diaz.

The character himself is a little yellow ball of sunshine, or personified citrus, toughened up with a spiky mohawk. His backstory is that he’s an expat making his home in Miami, having fled the grit and grime of the Bowery for a more laid-back Miami groove. But though he’s a little peppier than your average Gothamite, Raymundo’s New York snark shines through. Throughout the week, his visage peppered The Standard Spa, from the mural walls of The Café to the pool deck. On Sunday at The Standard’s annual recuperative BBQ, a bevy of other characters—as well as Jeremyville, the person—showed up, proffering good vibes all around.

For the mainly-cosmopolitan masses who flock to Miami for Basel, Raymundo and the other Jeremyville characters are a reminder that chilling out (ideally near a beach) does the body good. “‘Punk and Sunshine All The Time.’ That's Raymundo's motto. It's about using energy of the anarchy and iconoclasm in your life, and transforming it into something positive; using a punk mindset as a force for inner change and growth. We can all use some redemption in our lives. Revolution creates inner evolution,” Jeremyville tells The Creators Project.

“Raymundo conveys a message of sunshine and optimism, an inner conclusion and resolve that comes from a place of initial anarchy and flux; positivity overcoming an underlying tension that this world often presents to us daily,” he continues. “‘Choose to build your own rainbow rather than smash things up,’ proffers Raymundo. He stands for less walls, and more bridges between us. [...] There is often a sense of redemption in my characters, many of them are flawed, but in the end their optimism and resolve shines through.”

A lot of Jeremyville’s work centers on this idea. His Community Service Announcements (CSA) are warm and fuzzy affirmations for inherently flawed beings, proclaiming things like, “Be Your Own Guru,” “Don’t Use Others to Get Ahead,” and “Hold It Together.” They’re a nice reminder that people don’t always have to be perfect, but we should try to be good.

Simplicity is essential to the work, too. “A lot of my art practice focuses on inventing a highly restrained and abstracted character and reducing it to its simplest forms. The character is more a manifestation of the message I am trying to convey, akin to an actor playing a role in an independent film that I’m directing,” Jeremyville says.

Putting the work on paper is rarely enough; Jeremyville pops off the page, peppering reality through public sculpture, street paste-ups, brand collaborations, home goods, shareable GIFs, and in this case, a mascot for The Standard and a takeover of The Standard Spa, at Miami Beach.

Raymundo and his friends may have popped up all over the property—on Spa amenities, the walls of the Juice Bar, as pool floaties, and as giant fiberglass sculptures—but it felt less like a takeover and more like an infusion of whimsical serenity. “The look is very restrained, pop, icon based, and reducing the color scheme to just black, yellow, and white. Black for the punk aesthetic, yellow for optimism, and white for the empty room inside us for inner change to take place,” he says.

Normally limited to the far reaches of the Earth, an artist is recreating the Aurora Borealis with a set of high-powered lasers. Swiss artist Dan Acher, of Happy City Lab's new project, BOREALIS, projects blue and green onto clouds in the night sky to create a facsimile of the Northern Lights. Acher's work is about creating public experiences that reach thousands of people, disrupting their daily routines. Last year he installed a giant light switch in Geneva that, when pressed by passers-by, projected a giant eyeball onto a nearby building.

With BOREALIS, he graduates from a building to the entire sky above the Swiss city of Lausanne. "People stopped in their tracks, in awe. Voices went quiet and, somehow, under this expanse covered by the lights, people would gather and create small groups to live this experience together," he tells The Creators Project. The result is reminiscent of Daan Roosegaard's, Waterlicht, which uses lasers to represent the water held back by Dutch dams.

Watch a video of the BOREALIS, capable of bringing the Northern Lights far and away from its native latitudes, below.

Meet Nestawedjat, a married woman who lived in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. She was about five feet tall and died in her late 30s or 40s, around 2,700 years ago. After her death, the bones of her nose were broken so as to access the inside of her skull with a hooked instrument, and remove her brain. Her internal organs—except for her heart, which was believed to be the center of intellect and memory—were also taken out, and put inside packages that were nestled between her legs. Her mouth, ribcage, and abdomen were filled with packing materials, and spherical bundles of cloth were lodged inside her eye sockets, on top of which were placed artificial eyes made of stone or glass. Amulets were positioned atop her throat. Her entire body was covered in a thick layer of resin, wrapped in linen bandages, and buried inside three nesting coffins.

Mummy under CT scanner at Royal Brompton Hospital in London.

Many of these details recently surfaced thanks to the mummy’s brief passage through a Dual Energy CT scanner at Royal Brompton Hospital in London (outside of regular patient hours). In recent years, around 25 mummies from the British Museum have been scanned, six of which were chosen to be featured in the traveling exhibition Egyptian Mummies: Exploring Ancient Lives, which premieres at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum this week. Alongside the decorated coffins of six individuals from ancient Egypt—two “ladies of the house,” a temple singer, a priest, a teenager, and a young child—the exhibition shows us what our eyes cannot see: incredibly detailed, layer-by-layer visualizations of the remains that lay inside.

Coffins of the six mummies in the exhibition. Clockwise, from top left: Nestawedjat; a priest’s daughter, Tamut; a priest, Irthorru; a young man from Roman Egypt; a two year-old boy from the Roman Period; and a temple singer.

Lucky for Nestawedjat, shortly after her arrival in Europe in 1851, the British Museum denied a local surgeon’s request for permission to unwrap the mummy. At the time, public unwrappings were staged in front of large audiences, and were often more about sensationalism than advancing our knowledge of mummification. Ethically speaking, we’ve come a long way since then, but our desire to see inside—and better understand ancient Egyptian society—persists. Starting in the 1980s, researchers began using non-invasive X-ray imaging techniques, which offered significant insight while leaving mummies untouched. Today’s latest CT scanners, which circulate two X-ray energy sources of different wavelengths around the body, capture images in unprecedented detail. Thanks to engineering software, the data can be used to create 3D models.

Mummy of two-year-old boy visualized inside his coffin, but without wrappings.

“We wanted to take visitors as close to the truth as science allows us to get,” explains Daniel Antoine, the British Museum’s Curator of Physical Anthropology. He and his team have been working nonstop for over a year to prepare the 3D visualizations for the exhibition. “The CT scan itself lasts 30 seconds, but it takes thousands of hours to segment the layers, to identify where the skin ends and textile begins. It was a labor of love.”

While these new technologies are groundbreaking for the field, Antoine says he didn’t want the exhibition to be “all about the science.” Science, in this case, is meant to be a vehicle that allows us to have a more immediate, instinctual connection with these ancient individuals: “We wanted to remind the viewer that these are people who once lived—that’s why we put ‘ancient lives’ in the title,” the curator tells us.

The many magical amulets buried with Tamut, including a metal winged goddess on her throat and a metal falcon on her chest, which symbolizes resurrection.

Faced with the precise contours of these remarkably well preserved bodies, it’s impossible not to feel a connection—and the data gleaned from the scans further sharpens the outlines of each personal story. We learn, for example, that a woman who lived around 900 BC, named Tayesmutengebtiu (or Tamut for short), suffered not from some obscure ancient illness, but from the biggest killer in the developed world today: cardiovascular disease. We discover that she and a female temple singer from Thebes had very short natural hair, possibly indicating that they were accustomed to wearing wigs. And overall, we witness first-hand the great care with which the bodies were prepared, and how well ancient Egyptians understood human anatomy.

In addition to helping us visualize ancient life, scanning will provide insight into how the mummies are faring today: “We can CT scan the same mummy over several decades, and monitor if there are any changes occurring on the inside.” Routine scans will especially be useful to track if a mummy’s travels have any impact: After this exhibition in Sydney, Nestawedjat, Tamut, and the four other mummies are being sent to the Science Museum in Hong Kong, before moving on to other venues in the Asia-Pacific region.

Peeling back the layers of the young man from Roman Egypt (c. AD 140-180): His body was decorated with an elaborate necklace made of faience or stone beads (highlighted in blue) and flowers made of a wax-like substance (highlighted in dark red). His internal organs (highlighted in pink) were not removed.

Imaging from Nestawedjat’s mummy. Left: The brain was removed from the skull via the nose. The embalmer showed great care not to damage the delicate surrounding bones. Right: Nestawedjat’s body was covered in resin to aid in preservation.

Sections through Tamut’s head show that the brain was extracted via the nasal passage and that the same route was used afterwards to introduce textile (here artificially colored in green) into the skull cavity.

A cube of ice might not seem like the ideal place for a Christmas tree, but that's where one appears to be in British artist and sculptor Alex Chinneck's latest public artwork Fighting fire with ice cream. The seasonal installation is at Granary Square in Kings Cross, London and the suspended tree is 17' tall and covered in 1,200 lights.

Although it might have the apperance of it, the 23' cube isn't actually ice but instead has been carved from two tons of resin. Chinneck also created a puddle to give the appearance it was melting into the nearby fountains—the puddle was created from 550 pounds of wax.

The installation, about the height of a two-story house, follows on from Chinneck's previous public artworks that combine architecture, construction, sculpture, and engineering to create illusory, tricksy sculptures that defy expectations. Past pieces include a gravity-defying parked car and his A Bullet from a Shooting Star for last year's London Design Festival which featured a 15-ton electricity pylon balanced upside down.

“The work has been created for everyone and anyone," Chinneck says in a press statement. "Every project that we produce is unique to the place in which it stands; I wanted to create an installation for King’s Cross that was visually and theatrically intertwined with the fountains of Granary Square. They bring the location to life and so it was logical to take inspiration from their animating presence. If any Christmas parties run out of ice, they’ll know where to find some!”

HBO's uncanny saga of a theme park full of artificially intelligent robots, Westworld, keeps earning comparisons to the network's largest franchise, Game of Thrones. Whether it's Westworld's 11.7 million viewers or $100 million budget—the same cost as Game of Thrones Season 6—it's hard not to speculate that HBO sees the show as a potential flagship to rely on after Westerosi politics quiet down. While we could talk numbers, the best way to compare two franchises are their fans. We've gathered a few of the the best Westworld tributes on Instagram, so you can decide if the community has what it takes to sit on the HBO drama throne.

Romantic sites in Rome get a magical, lambent aura in the infrared photography of Italian artist Milán Rácmolnár. By capturing lightwaves that exist outside of humans' range of vision, Rácmolnár shifts the natural colors and textures of one of the world's most documented cities. The act of photographing infrared light lends a surreal, Dr. Seuss-esque quality to Rome's flora. Rácmolnár began experimenting with photography in high school. By converting his Nikon D3200 into a full spectrum camera that captures visible and infrared light at the same time, Rácmolnár renders the scenic city in turquoise and cerise.

His Rome in Infrared (Roma Rosa) Series documents Rome's world-famous landmarks alongside scenes of everyday Roman life, like a gas station and a windswept bus stop. “One can easily recognize [Rome] even if one has never visited this stunning city,” Rácmolnár tells The Creators Project. “So I wanted to create a series which makes you think in a different way about the well-known.”

Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores, James Marsden as Teddy, Anthony Hopkins as Robert Ford

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? It's a question that, perhaps, has never been so ingrained in a TV show as it is in the HBO original series (and internet obsession), Westworld. Set in the most immersive theatrical installation the world has ever seen, Westworld follows Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), a megalomaniacal artist/technician striving to make his creations indistinguishable from reality.

In last night's 90-minute Season One finale, Bicameral Mind, Ford explains a theory to Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) that Michelangelo's Creation of Adam depicts God inside an anatomically accurate human brain—an example of art imitating biology. The theory, originally suggested by Dr. Frank Lynn Meshberger in the 1990s, argues that the cloth surrounding God in Michelangelo's painting takes the form of the mind, including the brainstem and the pre-frontal cortex. According to the New York Times, Meshberger maintains that Michelangelo is depicting the moment Adam gained intelligence, rather than his birth. "Adam is already alive. I think what God is giving to Adam here is intellect," he tells theTimes in a 1990 interview.

Ford takes it in a different direction, arguing that, "The divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from our own minds." In this episode, it comes to light that Arnold (Jeffrey Wright), Ford's deceased partner alluded to throughout the series, wanted to bestow intelligence on the hosts as God does in Creation of Adam. However, Ford believes his creations they must seize it themselves. He creates a bloody "new narrative" that dominates the finale's climax—the spark of life between the brain and body that paves the way for intelligence.

Today, artists seeking to prod, question, and break the boundaries of reality are plenty. New media artists like Rachel Rossin and Jacolby Satterwhite examine humanity in the digital realm. The Otonaroid and Telenoid, a pair of robots at the Miraikan (National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in Tokyo, perform an uncanny role as the first mechanical news anchors. Virtual reality filmmakers like Nonny de la Peña and Chris Milk create worlds believable enough to trigger deep emotional responses, and VR theme parks immersing visitors in physical video games are popping up all over the world. In the tech sector, Rony Abovitz's mysterious mixed reality start-up, Magic Leap, is attempting to create virtual sights indistinguishable from the physical world. Life will go on to imitate art as these creators and more watch Westworld and internalize the ideas presented by showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.

As artists themselves, Nolan and Joy weave ideas top thinkers are grappling with today into Westworld. Artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, biomimicry, land art, history, religion, philosophy, and drama are copied from life into both the show and the park's DNA. One reason the park is frightening is because it's so similar to what virtual reality promises in the future: a completely immersive storytelling medium. In our reality, it seems that art is still imitating life, but in Season Two of Westworld, it seems viewers will find out if life has what it takes to imitate art.

Boasting a wide-ranging lineup unfazed by the pressures of including nonstop high-profile premieres, the 16th-annual Marrakech International Film Festival kicks December off with its own natural focus on independent cinema and a humanist approach. Located in Morocco’s fourth-largest city and founded by His Royal Highness Prince Moulay Rachid, it’s a fest housed in spectacular theatres and surroundings, with two dozen selections from veteran and up-and-coming world filmmakers alike. How often do you find just two films overall from the United States (Disney’s Moana and Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits in this case) falling in among those from China, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, South Africa, and many more?

In years past the fest has attracted the likes of Martin Scorsese, Isabelle Huppert, and Francis Ford Coppola to preside over the festival jury, and this year features an especially rare get in the form of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. Dubbed one of cinema’s “most adventurous artists” by Scorsese himself, the now-retired Turin Horse and Werckmeister Harmonies director has remained famously private, and also infamously outspoken when he does step into the public eye (visit this MUBI interview from July for such a taste). Joining him on the jury of nine is a collection of actors, directors, and writers such as Bruno Dumont, Jason Clarke, Suzanne Clément, and Jasmine Trinca.

The MIFF 2016 In Competition Lineup. Photo Courtesy of Marrakech International Film Festival

For attendees the lineup means a chance to walk into a cinema and not know what they’re about to see—a rare occurrence in a festival landscape that largely rotates the same heavily hyped slate of films. There are a few heavy-hitters: Kim Ji-Woon’s dazzling The Age of Shadows, a 1920s-set film about Korean independence under Japanese occupation, opens the festival, while Paul Verhoeven’s controversial latest starring Isabelle Huppert, Elle, screens later on. But others, like Navid Mahmoudi’s Parting or Wang Xuebo’s Knife In The Clear Water, are socially-minded feature debuts by promising directors, given the rare spot in a festival with room to breathe and discuss their work afterwards.

The MIFF 2016 Out of Competition Lineup. Photo Courtesy of Marrakech International Film Festival.

Between screenings, the festival will make room for tributes to actress Isabelle Adjani (Possession, Queen Margot), Shinya Tsukamoto (director of the Tetsuo films), Paul Verhoeven, and Moroccan comedian and actor Abderrahim Tounsi. On top of that, they will also feature Masterclass presentations from Verhoeven, Paul Haggis, and Russian director Pavel Lounguine, following up the solid bill last year of the late Abbas Kiarostami and directors Park Chan-Wook and Fatih Akin. The fest is an auteur-driven display, no doubt, but it’s impressive to see a fest leave room for invitees to really dig into their work’s themes and universal impact. It’s been the plan all along for Prince Moulay Rachid, however, as he reflects that the fest should “support and promote a vision of the world in which responsibilities are shared, in which origins and differences are set aside to give way to a common wish to contribute to a better future.”

Photo Courtesy of Marrakech International Film Festival

The Marrakech International Film Festival runs from December 2nd - 10th, 2016, in Marrakech, Morocco. For more information visit festivalmarrakech.info, and see below for a full list of films screening at the festival.

]]>http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/217662Charlie Schmidlin for The Creators ProjectFilmFilmFilmsFilm FestivalfestivalsmarrakechMoroccoMarrakech International Film FestivalMarrakech Film FestivalBela TarrThe FitsMoanahttp://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/brazils-new-shamans-miami
Mon, 05 Dec 2016 17:50:00 +0000. New Shamans/Novos Xamãs Installation View, 2016. Images courtesy of the artists and the Rubell Family Collection

Brazil’s complex cultural climate and the country’s intimate indigenous roots come to life in the group show New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists, currently on view at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. The 12 artists included in the show, ranging from young artists with emerging careers like Paulo Nimer Pjota and Marina Rheingantz to established, veteran figures of the Brazilian art scene like Sonia Gomes, occupy the entire ground floor of the Rubell’s giant space with often larger-than-life paintings, photographs, and sculptural installations.

New Shamans/Novos Xamãs Installation View, 2016

The works on view hover strangely between a unifying synchronicity and an eclectic individuality, perhaps a result of how the country’s recent political turmoil is universal, but undoubtedly affects each artist differently. assume vivid astro focus’ street art, vaguely trompe l'oeil panel is a far cry stylistically from Thiago Martins de Melo's ambitious installation of mounted, severed heads and sculptures of indigenous figures, but both share a vibrant energy and explosiveness.

assume vivid astro focus, Untitled (Garden #6)

Curated by Juan Roselione-Valadez as well as Mera and Don Rubell, the exhibition is the result of repeated visits by the Rubell family to Brazil, where they have been building and fostering relationships with the artists on view over time: “Going to Brazil, meeting artists, and experiencing their work, we were particularly intrigued by certain artists who engaged a more intuitive and spiritual approach to their practice,” tell Mera and Don Rubell.

Sonia Gomes, Untitled from the Twisting Series

“For us, their works connected to traditions of shamanism in European art, like Joseph Beuys, early performance work, and Hermann Nitsch. Each artist in the show has a personal and unique style, but is profoundly influenced by the rich history and vastness of Brazil.”

Paulo Nazareth, Untitled from the For Sale Series

Despite any shamanistic influence and cultural overlap that may be found among the works, the Rubells’ travels to Brazil were done without any deliberate or predetermined thematic focus in mind; the results are in some ways merely a reflection of a Brazilian and worldwide cultural climate: “We didn’t go to Brazil with a theme in mind; we went to discover artists. And what we found were overarching concerns like racism and gender issues that were universal, but the means of artistic manifestation were individual,” the Rubells explain. “As with our encounters in other countries, artists in Brazil gave us a deeper understanding of the world we live in.”

New Shamans/Novos Xamãs Installation View, 2016

If you're still around Miami, make sure to stop by the Rubell Family Collection for New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists. Otherwise, the exhibition will be on view until August 25th, 2017, alongside an exhibition of Brazilian video art.

A lot went down last week in the weird and wild world of Art. Some things were more scandalous than others, some were just plain wacky—but all of them are worth knowing about. Without further ado:

+ Archeologists found a lost ancient residential city in Egypt dating back to 5316 BCE. [Egypt Independent]

+ Madonna had a good time at Art Week Miami. During an event on Friday, the singer covered Britney Spears’s "Toxic," twerked with Ariana Grande and raised $7.5 million with ex-husband Sean Penn. [Rolling Stone]

+ A warehouse art space in Oakland, CA went up in flames on Friday during an electronic dance party claiming the lives of at least 33 people. [CNN]

+ The New York Times released a 360 video of Standing Rock protesters celebrating the decision to halt the proposed oil pipeline in North Dakota. [The New York Times]

+ Protesters called for the removal of artwork by Zwelethu Mthethwa from the Iziko South African National Gallery on account of the photographer’s ongoing trial for the murder of a 23-year-old sex worker named Nokuphila Moudy Kumalo. [The Citizen]

Fetishism, Russian folklore and culture, and Orthodox religion are the subjects explored and subverted in a new show by Russian-born London-based artist Karina Akopyan. Akopyan's Martyrs & Matryoshkas opens this week at London's Truman Brewery and features illustrations, self-portrait photography, sculptures and installations that use the iconography of Russia, like the matryoshka doll and peasant clothes, to explore and question Russian identity, religion, values and Akopyan's relationship to it all. "The show looks at the place of tradition in contemporary society, and questions whether it’s a beautiful necessity, or conversely, a deceleration of progress," Akopyan tells The Creators Project.

Black Priestess. Image courtesy of the artist

Akopyan draws on her past and her experiences growing up in a place where she was surrounded not only by the doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church, which she managed to avoid being drawn into unlike many of her peers, but also religious art. "I think religious art is just simply beautiful," Akopyan says. "It is very pleasing visually, and I can’t help but to be attracted to it—the patterns, the colors, the epic subjects. Scenes of hell and heaven...I also can’t deny they include some interesting, sometimes dark, deep topics. But just like people often use religion as an excuse for bigotry and judgment, I don’t have an issue with using religion for its symbolism decoratively and taking some ideas and analysis from their subjects."

Borsch is Thicker than Blood. Image courtesy of the artist

Akopyan's work, however, takes the rich visuals of religious art and combines them with the latex corsets and rubber thigh-high boots of fetish culture. Russian nesting dolls are given spikes or their rosy-cheeked wooden heads become a fetishistic mask. Akopyan has been a participant in the London fetish scene for the last 10 years since she began going to famed club Torture Garden. It's been running for nearly 30 years and is now one of the largest in Europe.

Hell Raiser Face. Image courtesy of the artist

"I think that was a huge catalyst in my love of fetish art, which at that point was only developing," Akopyan notes. "I learned about artists like Tom of Finland, John Willie, Carlo and Eric Stanton a bit later as part of my 'scene' art education. I got a lot of inspiration by just talking to people, getting information first hand, not necessarily of already existing visual art, but also from performances and dress-up culture there. One of the things about it, which could be seen as both good and bad, is that a lot of creativity stays there and doesn’t get out to see daylight and a wider audience, but I think it’s a great place to find inspiration still."

Gzel I. Image courtesy of the artist

While fetishism and religion may make for an uneasy combination for many people, they have obvious parallels. The humbling religious acts of suffering or asceticism are both heavily masochistic. Even the ideas of confession, good and bad, and a sense of having wronged or sinned. "I really just can’t see how you can avoid fetishizing those things," Akopyan notes.

Night Train. Image courtesy of the artist

Suffering, as a concept, is one of the things that also intrigued the artist about the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Citing Stalker, Andrei Rublev, and Mirror as influences, Akopyan notes that, like religion, Tarkovsky in these films uses suffering as a way for characters to reach enlightenment and wisdom.

Other filmmakers that have inspired her include Stanley Kubrick, Francis Coppola, Ingmar Bergman, Jan Švankmajer and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Other artistic inspirations include the perverse Japanese art of Toshio Saeki, British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and Mexican culture and its veneration of death.

Holy Matrimony (Til Pelmeni us do Part). Image courtesy of the artist

All these feed into Akopyan's work, which both subverts and celebrates Russia, its history, religion, and culture, filtering its iconography through the provocative, stylised, almost talismanic imagery of fetish art. "I often ask myself what is it about the fetish scene that attracted me so much, and the answer I think is that it was a perfect escapism from the norms I’ve lived through back in Russia. It was the perfect answer: two fingers up to it."

Max Hooper Schneider, High Art. All images courtesy of the artists and galleries. All photos by the author

Adopting a less art market-centric approach than its peers (although the works in the booth are ultimately still for sale), the Positions section at Art Basel Miami Beach allows curators, critics, and collectors to discover ambitious new talents from across the globe, by providing a platform for a single artist to present one major project. Feeling more like condensed solo shows than the typical art smattering seen at fairs, the 16 booths in this section brought the heat, and we’re breaking down our favorites (in a non-preferential, alphabetical order) for you to take a gander.

Mike Cloud at Thomas Erben Gallery

Mike Cloud, Thomas Erben Gallery

The first project on the list revolves around the hybrid painting-sculptures of Mike Cloud at Thomas Erben Gallery. These vibrant, geometric, and heavily layered canvases are literally hung on the wall, not with nails but through the use of thin pink leather belts hanging from wooden pegs. Supported on the bottom by small platforms but appearing ready to give way at any moment, the works are meant to explore death by hanging, with written inscriptions of popular figures who have died in this way scrawled across the wooden edges of the frames.

Mike Cloud, Thomas Erben Gallery

Many of the individuals listed died by voluntary suicide, like Robin Williams, Amber Hilberling, and (supposedly) Judas Iscariot, but other names included in the work represent individuals forcefully hung or who accidentally hung themselves without suicidal intentions, like Mary the Elephant and actor David Carradine.

Ana Luiza Dias Batista at Galeria Marilia Razuk

Ana Luiza Dias Bastista, Galeria Marilia Razuk

Moving south of the equator, the booth at Galeria Marilia Razuk featured the works of Brazilian artist Ana Luiza Dias Bastista, revolving around collected keys, traditional games, and Brazilian culture-at-large. The highlights of the stand are the two long rows of enlarged key designs, appropriated from actual façades of Brazilian key shops. Dias Bastista supposedly negotiated a series of exchanges with the shops, trading money, artwork, or other goods in exchange for permission to use and tamper with the key shop store designs. The artist made a series of unadorned copies of each key, acting as blank keys waiting to have personal information imprinted on them, although they are in fact incapable of opening anything.

Ana Luiza Dias Bastista, Galeria Marilia Razuk

Accompanying the wall keys are a series of keys embedded in nine cement blocks, meant to represent a game of tic-tac-toe played between the gallerist and the artist and also a reference to a fading tradition of Brazilian key shops involving the decorative embedding of keys in the sidewalk in front of the store. Also included is a large safe in the shape of a Rubik’s Cube, frozen while turning. The piece effectively acts as a nonfunctional object both in terms of playing the game (all sides are visually identical) and as a safe, made entirely of cement and impossible to open or store anything inside of piece.

Melanie Gilligan at Galerie Max Mayer

Melanie Gilligan, Galerie Max Mayer

Presenting a structurally complex video installation (as she has a tendency to do), the central, singular piece by artist Melanie Gilligan at Galerie Max Mayer consists of two cubic monitors embedded into hovering industrial rods. Each cube presents two divided videos on each side, totaling 12 videos per cube, focusing on documentary footage the artist took of two workers on each American coast. The more elevated cube portrays the life of a medical supplies transporter based in Upstate New York, a representation of the life of a blue-collar professional in a non-urban setting. The lower cube shows the life of a woman working an office job in San Francisco, arguably the pinnacle of ongoing urban gentrification. Like a sociological Big Brother, the parallels (and lack of) between the two become increasingly pronounced as you walk around the structure and its rapidly shifting and overloading displays of information.

Max Hooper Schneider at High Art

Max Hooper Schneider, High Art

Like entering a mad scientist’s lab with a predilection for heavy metal and those kitschy plasma globes you would find at Spencer’s in the early 2000s, artist Max Hooper Schneider’s booth via High Art was undeniably one of the most unique booths in the entire fair in terms of materials alone. From a neon-encased terrarium filled with live and artificial natural specimens to a sort of post-apocalyptic or Paleolithic display of Schneider’s personal cassette collection with an embedded fog machine, the artist presented the machinations of a mind concerned with more than just the art historical canon and contemporary modes of producing art, a fact solidified by Schneider’s less-than-traditional trajectory as an artist, holding a bachelor’s degree in Biology and a masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard rather than the expected BFA and MFA.

Max Hooper Schneider, High Art

Other works in the booth included an encased assortment of alligator claws, a creepily visceral piece that prompted non-stop questioning from fair goers to the gallerists as to “what the hell is in that cage?”, as well as three plasma globes filled with different noble gasses and electric currents, mounted on repurposed recycling cans, meant as embryos of some sort, according to a gallerist at High Art.

Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

Maggie Lee, Real Fine Arts

Although her works on view have never been shown before, Maggie Lee’s booth at Real Fine Arts was effectively an extension of pre-existing inquiries and explorations taken on by the artist. In a similar vein to Mommy, a video Lee made in 2015 in response to her mother’s sudden death, the artist shows a highly personal video of a reconciliation with her estranged and now sickly father in Thailand, a work not as immediately tragic as Mommy but more like a prolonged release of pain, as she sees her final parental figure seemingly approach death.

Maggie Lee, Real Fine Arts

For the booth, Lee has also continued her tradition of glass tank dioramas, presenting two very different iterations. The first glass tank is entirely empty beyond a colorful floor pattern, seeming to represent a desolate dance floor, a feeling that is similarly mimicked in the floor pattern of the actual booth. The second diorama holds a strange menagerie of sitting ‘Jenny dolls’ (off-brand Barbie dolls made in Japan), fake cheese, and a crescent moon. Lee’s dioramic works are often meant as loose representations of her childhood and adolescence, to which a Real Fine Arts gallerist adds that the booth is meant as a ‘life-size version of her dioramas’, solidifying the idea that the booth is effectively an aesthetic exploration of Lee’s personal life, shared with the massive Art Basel audience.

In an ode to antique image capture, two black snakes squirm and crawl over a bare mattress, a deceased baby lies peacefully in her cradle, and a nude wind-swept woman seems straight out of a raunchy Victorian photography collection. Hosted by gallery Hans P. Kraus Jr., Adam Fuss Daguerreotypes & The Womb of the Pre-Raphaelite Imagination is a photography exhibition where the unseen becomes the seen.

Displaying a combination of contemporary and 19th-century photographs, the exhibition transcends time with an amalgamation of puzzling images. Exhibited is the work of contemporary photographer Adam Fuss, whose images capture the archetypal and universal themes of fear, desire, and hope that saturate human existence. Prefacing Fuss’s work is a selection of 19th-century nudes and post-mortem images from Victorian photographers. By channeling the universal themes of life and death, Adam Fuss Daguerreotypes & The Womb of the Pre-Raphaelite Imagination explores the metaphysical side of mortality, where inherent and timeless symbolism is captured by early photographic techniques.

Fuss uses the camera-free method of a daguerreotype, a pre-photographic technique developed in the 19th century. The invention of the daguerreotype was monumental, generating a new way society responded to and perceived visual information. Additionally, the 19th century saw the themes of love and death being associated with early photographic images which are mirrored in Fuss’s work.

Using the daguerreotype to seize ghostly manifestations of light and dark that harbour in each pictorial background, Fuss uses a bed as a recurring prop—reflecting sex, death, childbirth, and sleep. The use of the daguerreotype creates timeless, enigmatic photographs as the combinations of chemistry and light result in virtually three-dimensional images where human flesh and serpent scales become almost touchable. Fuss does not see his photographic process as predominantly 19th century, rather, a neutral artistic process that can establish perplexing imagery. As he tells The Creators Project, “I don't see the 19th century processes as 19th century, I see them more as historically neutral as their use in the 19th century was based on commercial issues. If you remove that aspect they are just really processes and are really interesting for their print and artistic possibilities.”

Investigating the dualistic aspect of the ancient symbol of the snake, Fuss examines the reptile's negative incarnation in Snakes and Ladders, a favorite game of his childhood. Although the reptile is historically associated with the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, the serpent is also associated with healing and in some cultures a potent deity. A creature which sheds its skin continuously throughout its lifespan, Fuss uses the animal’s symbolism as a metaphor to represent the continuous renewal of life, examining rebirth, transformation and immortality. “It seems like the snake is behind or just below the surface. Or even present but invisible...perhaps in these works it is given form,” Fuss explains.

In colloquial terms, “uncanny” usually means an extremely close likeness, but Sigmund Freud defined the uncanny as something weirdly and nearly familiar—not wholly recognizable. This incongruence induces a sense of cognitive dissonance, a liminal space that’ll make you feel both drawn to and repulsed by the subject. Removing the element of existential disgust, these installations brought me to the realm of the uncanny: momentarily removed from reality, but starkly aware of the fact that although I felt transported, I was standing in the middle of an art trade show. Many of the works here use immersion to explore sexuality, identity, and the relationship of the body to nature, the city, or technology. Temporary escapism, the kind that ultimately brings you back to reality, can be fun.

Design studio Atelier Biagetti transformed Patricia Findlay’s booth into a lush analyst’s office. The wallpaper features a shimmery print of two lovers, recalling Greek mythology; the details on the flesh-colored chaise lounge look, suspiciously, like nipples. Two blonde twins, DesignByMiami, “analyze” guests. They hold up Rorschach blots and I let my subconscious talk: “A moon. An orange. A butterfly in a womb.” They give me an eye exam, pointing to letters on a mirrored eye chart that spells out NO SEX, and ask me to name a word that begins with each letter. “Olive. Sensuous. Everyone.” Twin #2 sits next to me and whispers “Follow your dreams” in my ear. Perhaps she says the same thing to everybody, but I hope not.

Maggie Lee, Real Fine Arts, Art Basel Miami Beach

In Maggie Lee's installation, a teenage girl’s bedroom is sacred—a temple to house her while she freaks out about her impending womanhood. Lee’s linoleum-floored bedroom installation is tongue-in-cheek, tender, and confessional. A cardboard heart reading “FUCK THIS GOVERNMENT” hangs from the ceiling, dolls stare at you from a fish tank, a tab of acid rests on stuffed seal’s tongue, evoking memories of eating psilocybin mushrooms and falling asleep next to stuffed animals at 16. There’s a small TV, Daughter TV, screening the sequel to Lee’s documentary, Mommy, an ode to the artist’s mother following her unexpected death. In this sequel, Lee visits her estranged father in Taiwan. The humor found in the spaces of growth can be painful and beautiful.

Taro Izumi’s Fish Bone as Slang (In Search of a Cat) is a large-scale video projection of the artist climbing onto and jumping off various items. There is a smaller installation nearby, called The Allure of the Whale that Winks with Its Fin; both are from the ongoing-since-2010 Fish-Bone-Hanger series. After filming himself standing and jumping throughout a cityscape, he replays it through a TV monitor surrounded by objects like hammers, plastic bottles, and a saw—which make the video itself look like these objects are part of the narrative. This gets filmed and projected by yet another camera; you watch the camera-within-a-camera-within-a-camera, distorted by the imagery of bottles and hardware. Meanwhile, Izumi plays with the notion of space and how we ought to use it.

Rives Wiley at Hamiltonian Gallery, SATELLITE Art Show

Another dream-within-a-dream, Rives Wiley’s DIY Laser Eye Surgery installation is a diorama—built right into the wall— inspired by YouTube tutorials. It depicts a tutorial for DIY Lasik surgery complete with color-changing eyedroppers, the person watching the video, and the space between the two of them. The video itself is made to look like a YouTube clip, with a red time-ticker carried along by pulleys. Then, we pull back —the diorama has a distorted slant— to the viewer, whose giant head is turned away from us. The lens glare of the camera hangs in the form of resin sculptures. It was hard not to step inside this dream world.

Part Cartagena, part Paris, part jungle, the hybrid city in this Plusdesign Gallery booth blasts loud bass and features Lucas Muñoz’s fish-tailed skateboards. You can trace the history of civilization in the objects here, from the bottom of the sea to the grit of the street.

Jerry Meyer at Denise Bibro Fine Art, CONTEXT Art Miami

Jerry Meyer has worked at the Psychiatry Department at the Yale School of Medicine for decades. His installation, My Great-Grandfather’s Attempts to Turn Sexual Energy into Electricity to Power Small Machinery Based on the Principles of Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla, invites viewers to step inside an office containing ephemera from a study conducted by Meyer’s fictional relative, Harris Claster, who attempted to turn men and women’s (but mostly women's) sexual energy and anxiety into electricity. Schmaltzy music fills the room, while apparatuses chart the anatomy of a woman’s orgasm and rate the level of her desire. A man elbowed me: “Funny, right?” It’s a humorous way to reveal that sad truth: to men, there’s nothing more uncanny than the female body, which might explain why they’ve tried to distill it into coded terminology for centuries.

Signe Pierce at Castor Gallery, SATELLITE Art Show

Signe Pierce’s neon-strobed dream scenes look pretty—it’s hard for something that pink and sensuous not to—but they’re testimonies to feminine empowerment. Pierce creates the world in which she occupies, claiming ownership of her own body, her own space. In Castor Gallery’s room at SATELLITE, dried palm fronds frame a silky, glowing bedroom, adorned with vintage girly mags, roses, and donuts. It’s a place for its creator, and you get to take part in, too.

One of a few locals at SATELLITE, &gallery represented Miami’s inherent dreaminess, with a lightbox by Nice ‘n’ Easy that looked like the view from a tropical window, prints by Miami native Maggie Dunlap, and a glowing duo of video suites by Willie Avendano. Avendano coded an algorithm to determine the randomness of the videos' components, which screen different parts of a dream sequence. They depict, at once, the chaotic and unreliable nature of romantic memory. Projected onto a billowy curtain, the scenes drift away from you, then back again.